BlitzBoks must take a long, hard look in the mirror
REACTION: South Africa’s players and management staff will have to take a long, hard look at themselves in the mirror, following their horror show at the Hamilton leg of the Sevens World Series.
Coach Neil Powell said the management and players took ‘full responsibility’ for the poor performance that saw them finish 10th place in Round Three of the series – their worst performance in years.
Powell admitting that it was a ‘very disappointing’ performance and ‘way below’ their regular and standards.
The BlitzBoks lost 14-36 to Kenya in their final Pool B match on Sunday and then went down 5-12 to Fiji in the ninth-place play-off in Hamilton.
Kenya’s victory over the BlitzBoks came after 14 consecutive wins for the South Africans, and two tries in the last two minutes by Fiji meant the Hamilton tournament ended in misery for Powell and his squad.
These results, coupled with New Zealand winning their home tournament, saw the BlitzBoks drop to joint-second spot on the overall World Series standings.
The Kiwis, who beat France by 27-5 in the Final, top the log with 63 points, followed by South Africa and France (48 points each).
For Powell, it was a frustrating weekend in which the BlitzBoks lost three matches in a row, a statistic that will hurt the squad, who came into the tournament on the back of 11 wins from their last 12 matches.
“We were just poor against Kenya, with our basics not on par,” said Powell about the performance that saw the BlitzBoks go down 0-19 0 in the opening half.
“If you can’t even win kick-offs you are in trouble.
“We were also playing catch-up rugby from early on and forced the game a bit, which again created mistakes they capitalised on.”
A late Muller du Plessis try saw the half-time gap close, but despite a late Zain Davids try, Kenya scored two quick tries, including an intercept, and it was all over.
“The unpredictability of sevens again showed.
“Sometimes you have a good week and a poor tournament, like this one, other times a bad week resulted in a good tournament,” Powell added.
Against Fiji, an early Angelo Davids try had the South Africans in control for all, but the last two minutes – when Fiji scored twice.
Powell was searching for positives from the Fiji encounter.
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“Yes, there were some positives from that match, and we can take that into [Round Four, in] Australia [next week],” Powell said.
“We managed to improve our control and it gave us some momentum to take to Sydney.
“The lack of finishing was still present though, but that was sort of the theme of our weekend. We could not finish the numerous opportunities we created and that was clearly not good enough.”
They have no choice but to improve next week, Powell insisted.
“We will have to plan this coming week accordingly.
“We will review what and why happened here and take it from there.”
The BlitzBoks depart for Australia on Monday.
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