Cape Town - Coach Allister Coetzee says that the Springboks are embarrassed by their 57-15 loss to the All Blacks, but feels that the major problem in SA rugby is a lack of fitness and aerial skills.
The world champions continued their journey to a new world record of victories as they ticked off No 17 to equal the mark for tier-one nations with a rollicking display in which they whipped the Boks by nine tries to zero.
While the South Africans used their old-style “suffocate and strangle” tactics to pressurise the All Blacks into making mistakes, the Kiwis ran the Boks to a standstill with ball-in-hand as the home team had to make endless tackles until the last quarter, where they ran out of steam to concede five tries in the final 20 minutes.
It was vintage All Black rugby at Kings Park in Durban, and a bitter reminder of how far the Boks have fallen. “In a way, it’s in a way embarrassing, you know – the way we sort of fell apart in the second half. I don’t want to make excuses. The only thing is if your effort is not good enough, and you get punished like this…” Coetzee told SuperSport TV after the match.
“Twenty minutes to go at 22-15, we are still in the game. And then there is a charge-down and everything sort of turned ugly after that. Ja, it’s tough and it’s hurting, and it’s something that you can’t measure of the effort of the players by – especially in the last 10 minutes, which was compounded by the yellow card as well (to Lood de Jager). We have to fix it, we have to fix it.”
Coetzee was referring to fullback Pat Lambie’s chip inside his 22 being charged down by All Black centre Anton Lienert-Brown, which led to Beauden Barrett’s first try of the evening that actually took New Zealand into a 22-12 lead with 25 minutes to go where after Morné Steyn added a fifth penalty to reduce the deficit to seven points.
But things did “turn ugly” a few minutes later when Lambie couldn’t claim an up-and-under as he was beaten in the air by Ben Smith, and it ended with TJ Perenara finishing off a breathtaking attack with a number of offloads in the tackle.
“The first thing is I think is that it’s not a Springbok problem, it’s a South African problem – our aerial skills. That’s the one thing. If you kick distance and you can’t handle their contestable kick back, then you have a problem. And it doesn’t matter what type of kick that you try to employ,” Coetzee said.
“If we kick contestables, they win it. If we kick distance, they’ve got their numbers back and we can’t handle that. Then it becomes difficult to play a kicking game, because you can’t run yourself out of your own half and think you are going to get territory by running out with a defence like they have.”
But when told that the All Blacks often run the ball out of their own half, the Bok coach replied: “Well, the big thing, like I said earlier in the year, is that… and I’m not pointing fingers – the first fingers that I’ll point is at me – is about our movement, our speed of movement off the ball. And that is where they are much better at this point in time.
“A lot of coaches have spoken about the fitness, a lot of coaches have spoken about their (New Zealand’s) systems. That is why you see in everything they do, they just set with more intensity – early on defence, early on attack, and that’s why they can get the space out wide.
“We are under constant pressure to win Tests. We are between a rock and a hard place, we need to blood new players at the beginning of a new four-year cycle, but we cannot experiment too much. We are embarrassed, but we need to stand up and show we have fight left in us.”
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Independent Media