‘We were not at our best’ – Strauss

Editor

After Saturday's one-sided home loss to the Lions, Bulls captain, Adriaan Strauss admitted they weren't impressed with their own performance.

The Springbok hooker said it was definitely a match his team would want to forget.

"We are not proud of this performance, definitely not. We've shown throughout the season that we can play better rugby than this," Strauss told Supersport.

"So we have a good break now, we still have a lot to play for in this competition and we need to learn from this. There are not a lot of positives we can take out of this but we still need to learn from it and get better, and I believe we will."

Strauss highlighted the areas of play where the Bulls themselves down on the day.

"We were definitely not at our best," he added.

"We gave them easy turnovers and we didn't hang onto the ball in contact situations. We let the ball slip out of our hands at times, and they were good at breakdown as well and creating legitimate turnovers.

"We need to give them credit it was a good performance by them, but as coach said we weren’t good enough. We didn’t pitch up the way we did last weekend.

The 30-year-old went onto laud the Lions' play.

"They were very good, they played a high-tempo game," said Strauss.

"We didn’t execute what we wanted to and the only thing that worked for us the only positive was the driving maul.

"Apart from that we gave them the opportunity to run at us, there was a lot of space for them and they made good decisions to run into space.

"I think their kicking game was good on the night as well. They were the better team on the night, they used the space better and we gave them the opportunities on the night."