Springboks eager to rebound after ‘honest assessment’ of All Blacks loss

Springbok head coach Jacques Nienaber said his players are aligned and fully focused on finishing this year’s Rugby Championship on a high when they host Argentina in Johannesburg on Saturday, July 29.

The world champions returned to South Africa from New Zealand and had a handful of training sessions in Pretoria during the last two days.

Mixed results in Rugby Championship

The Boks started their Rugby Championship campaign with an impressive 43-12 win over the Wallabies at Loftus Versfeld but were dealt a blow when they suffered a 35-20 defeat against the All Blacks in their next match.

The full Springboks squad were in camp on Wednesday following a two-day break for the players who were in action against the All Blacks in Auckland, and the coaches wasted no time trying to correct the wrongs from that encounter.

That result means that South Africa are currently lying in second position on the table with just one round of matches left to play in a truncated version of the Rugby Championship due to the upcoming Rugby World Cup in France.

The Boks are four points adrift of table-toppers New Zealand and have a points deficit of 28, which means their fate in the tournament will be determined by the result between the Wallabies and All Blacks in Melbourne on Saturday morning.

An All Blacks win would see them lifting the title, but should they suffer a loss, Nienaber’s troops will know exactly what they must do to win the tournament when they go up against Los Pumas in Johannesburg later that afternoon.

“The last two days were very important in the sense that we had a chance to do an honest assessment about what went wrong against New Zealand and to identify what we need to correct in our game going into our final match of the competition and the World Cup warm-up games,” said Nienaber.

“We were bitterly disappointed with last week’s performance, and we are well aware of the fact that we can’t make the same errors if we want to get our season back on track and build momentum.”

Focused on beating Los Pumas

With the side’s debriefing of the New Zealand result now concluded and numerous on-field and off-field training sessions also completed, Nienaber said: “We’ve done everything we could to find solutions to the errors we made last week, and we’ve already started working on it at our field sessions, so we can now put that behind us and move forward.

“When we reassemble on Sunday, our focus will be purely on Argentina, so we’ll hit the ground running again from Monday.”

The Boks will continue their preparations in Pretoria early in the week before making the short trip to Johannesburg on Wednesday, where they will wrap up their on-field work for the Test.

READ MORE: ‘Springboks not changing plans ahead of Argentina Test’ says Jacques Nienaber