Birmingham - On Saturday night the Springboks to a man were visibly shocked and just about speechless, but yesterday on a six-hour bus trip from the south eastern resort town of Eastbourne to the grimy midlands city of Birmingham they would have digested the enormity of their transgression against the green and gold jersey.
It must have been the quietest of bus trips and without doubt the man doing the most pondering would have been coach Heyneke Meyer. He knows that pandemonium has broken loose among supporters back home and that a chief complaint is that the team is too old, too tired and too injured, and the prime example is the captain, Jean de Villiers .
The latter had the look of a condemned man at the post-match press conference and it could well be the end of the road for the 34-year-old.
It is a tough one. Wise heads will say now is not the time to panic, and dropping the captain would be a major call, but as Meyer himself said last week: “If Jean does not make it, and he knows form is going to be the chief criteria for every player, we have other generals capable of leading the side”.
Victor Matfield is Meyer’s second choice leader, and he had a fairly decent game and it would not be a surprise if Meyer’s old right hand man from the Bulls is skippering the team before long.
Matfield was visibly shaken by the loss and he said after the 34-32 defeat: “This is as low as it gets. It is very difficult to comprehend what just happened, and very little was said in the change room. What honestly could we say?
“The Springboks have now suffered two catastrophic losses (in their last three Tests) and the only way we can fix such incredible disappointment is to win this World Cup,” Matfield said. “We had hoped to get momentum from this game; instead we have taken a step back, but we can fix it against Samoa and then carry on winning and improving. It feels like the end of the world but the fact is that it is not the end of the World Cup for us. It is not too late ...”
The primary problem with the Boks in Brighton was that they were “out-passioned” by the Japanese. The Brave Blossoms wanted it more. They were hungrier and that is why they could impose their game on the Boks, and that is why Bok supporters feel let down. A correctly-focused, properly-motivated Bok team with spring in their steps would never lose to Japan, no matter how wily their coach Eddie Jones is. His men played as if their lives depended on it. The Boks went through the motions and no matter how much they had said during the week that they respected Japan, in their hearts it was obvious that they did not.
Samoa will have been boosted by the success of the Japanese, and the match-up between these old World Cup rivals (they are inevitably grouped with the Boks) could be the game of the weekend. It is going to be thunderous in the collisions, certainly not a match for the faint of heart.
South Africa’s best player at the weekend, young lock Lood de Jager, said that rugby had a “funny way of turning heroes into villains and then into heroes again.
“If we are honest with ourselves, Japan should have had a larger winning margin,” the Cheetah said. “They were as good as we were bad. They lifted their game by 50percent and we went down by the same percentage.”
De Jager, who scored a spectacular try, said he would have given up scoring 10 tries to have been in a winning Bok team.
“We knew they would be well coached, Fourie and du Preez and Schalk Burger kept warning us how good their players are and how innovative they would be.
“They had a plan and they stuck to it ferociously, while we just could not get going.” - Pretoria News