Cheetahs rue missed opportunities

REACTION: Cheetahs head coach Izak van der Westhuizen and captain Victor Sekekete laments their side’s missed opportunities in the aftermath of their shock 20-25 loss to the Sharks in the Currie Cup.

Cheetahs head coach Izak van der Westhuizen was blunt in his assessment of what went wrong for his side.

“We created opportunities, we just didn’t manage to finish them off so we’ll have a look at the game, we’ll analyse it and we’ll take it from there.”

Captain Victor Sekekete shared his coaches’ sentiment, and also zoomed in on his side’s discipline that cost them in crucial stages of the game.

“That’s what we spoke about, we created a lot of opportunities, we just didn’t finish,”

He added: “Discipline again on the other hand – we get into their half, penalty, penalty and we’re back into our half, we can’t work like that.

We said to the team that we need to be better, we need to finish, we create so much opportunities but were just not finishing.”

He also stated that the tries the Sharks scored were due to their own wrongdoing and hope they’ll be better for it in their next match against the Lions.

“All the tries they scored was literally off our errors,”

He added: “We can look at ourselves and fix it for next week.”

On the big cat fight next week – Sekekete knows what to expect from the Lions and what his side need to do to get the result.

“The Lions are going to come here with the same mindset, we know they way they want to play, and they’re going to pick up the tempo so I think from our end we need to pitch up and we need to stick it to them.”

Coach Izak van der Westhuizen gave a vague assessment on his side’s injury concerns but hinted that they could have reinforcements ahead of the clash with the Lions.

“I think there’s one or two bumps, we’ll see how bad that is, we might have one or two guys back next week but again I can’t confrim that 100 percent.”