@Smuts said in All Blacks vs Springboks II:
@pakman said in All Blacks vs Springboks II:
@mariner4life said in All Blacks vs Springboks II:
I didn't watch yesterday, so knowing the score and reading the thread I actually expected much worse.
I thought at half time both coaches would have been very happy. We were by far the better team, imposed ourselves and were in front. They had been outplayed but were close.
Absolute horror show last quarter for us. Absolutely sublime for South Africa. Well done to them I'm very fucking impressed.
The ABs were the better team for first 60.
Letโs stop this idea right here. You were in the game but you were hardly on top.
Your scrum was โฆ under pressure, your lineout was creaking, you were losing the tactical kicking game and the aerial battle and youโd managed a solitary try (requiring 2 or 3 pieces of exceptional skill) at the cost of your playmakers taking a battering and gifting us a try. Reptitive creamings caused Least Useless Barrett to set up deeper and deeper. By the end of the half, it was hard to see where the forces of darkness might generate net points.
The good guys on the other hand could look at that half and say they just needed to keep dancing with them that brung em.
Theyโd bombed three clear chances without doing anything all that miraculous, one of which got called back after it was converted and another was only stopped by a sensational last gasp tackle over the try line. All while rejigging their backline to deal with injuries.
They also knew that sooner or later their work in the scrum was going to pay dividends, on the scoreboard and by opening holes around the park.
So 10-7 was a fairish reflection though not a good indicator of how the work done in the first half was likely to play out in the second.
One small part of what you wrote really struck me. You said "Your playmakers." We don't have any, and the ones we use are not very good at it. This team is lacking one, probably two natural playmakers. The ones we do use are not natural playmakers, whether it be 10, 15, 12. They have not gotten to where they are today by making play for others. We need to start valuing that quality again.








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