Durban – By the time Springbok scrum coach Pieter de Villiers had completed his press conference yesterday it was uncertain who had invoked greater wrath from the former French international – the match officials or the Bok forwards.
De Villiers, a veteran of 68 Tests for France, attributed the Boks’ scrumming demolition at the hands of the renowned Pumas pack to a combination of “inexplicable” decisions by referee Romain Poite and a failure of his tight forwards to take the fight to the opposition.
You got the feeling that it was the former failure that has really got the goat of De Villiers. Refereeing interpretations are mostly beyond a team’s control, but there are no excuses for a lack of appetite for front-line, trench warfare.
“What can we realistically change in five days before the return match?” De Villiers rhetorically asked himself. “Well, we can make sure we go back to one of the cornerstones of scrumming, and that is physically attacking your opponents, and we did not do that at Kings Park. We allowed them to physically dominate us, and that is terribly disappointing.”
It was downhill from there. The oldest cliché in the rugby book is that “it all starts up front”, but never was it more true than during the 37-25 reverse to the Pumas.
The Boks were on the back foot in the set-pieces, and that meant the Pumas loose forwards had a head start on their opponents in the race to the breakdown. The Pumas had quick ball which provided the platform for Juan Martin Hernandez to display his genius, while the Bok halfbacks correspondingly floundered, and those wonderful tries that the backs scored against better opposition in the All Blacks and the Wallabies, were never in danger of being replicated.
De Villiers said that he could not defend the failure of his tight five.
“I hate making excuses because nothing can change the result. But yes, it was a frustrating day and I have written to Romain to ask for explanations for some of his decisions. To be honest, some of them I just do not understand. Not one of our scrums went to completion, so it is hard to get a full assessment of our scrumming technique when virtually every scrum ended in a penalty either for or against us.”
De Villiers defended the performance of young tighthead Vincent Koch, who appeared to come off second best against Marcos Ayerza, the 32-year-old Leicester Tigers loosehead.
“That duel has to be seen in the right context,” De Villiers said. “Vincent was playing against a very experienced prop who better than most knows scrum manipulation is a fine art and what it requires to appear on the right side of the law. Many would say he was (illegally) scrumming inwards, but that is something the officials must look at having had it brought to their attention.
“From Vincent’s side, I can tell you he is very keen to have another go after having learned a big lesson from an old hand from the Northern hemisphere. That was the first time Vincent had scrummed against a Northern hemisphere prop. He has learned and will be much better for the experience.”
De Villiers knows better than anybody that nothing is going to change in terms of scrumming interpretation between now and Buenos Aries on Saturday night. His players will be wiser for the experience at Kings Park, where they were worked over by shrewder opposition, but the one thing they can change is their attitude.
“Two matches in a row we will not make the mistake of not pitching with an aggressive approach to the scrum,” the 43-year-old said. “That is the one thing we can change. Normally we have this side of the game sorted out, but it just did not happen against Argentina. However, it can be rectified, no matter who referees the game.” - The Star