Wales in historic Boks win
BLOEMFONTEIN - A pressure conversion from the touchline with just over a minute to go earned Wales an historic 13-12 win over the Springboks to level the Castle Lager Test Series with one game to go in front of a packed Toyota Stadium in Bloemfontein yesterday.
Wales had played the Boks 11 times in South Africa before this game and lost every one of them. They have been creeping incrementally closer to notching a first victory, however, and were probably unlucky to lose close games in Nelspruit in 2014 and again in the first test in Pretoria last week.
Perhaps it was the swings and roundabouts theory that applied this time around, for had they lost it, this was not a game that Wales would have been able to look back at as one where they were unlucky. Wales won simply because they hung in in the face of ferocious South African pressure for most of the game until there was a significant momentum shift in the last quarter of an hour.
MOMENTUM
The Boks were leading 12-3 when Skipper Handre Pollard kicked his fourth penalty in the 58th minute and they looked destined to clinch the series. They had the momentum, they had the ascendancy, and it just required decent game management for them to wrap it up and turn next week’s final test in Cape Town into a dead rubber game.
But their game management was horrible in the last minutes and it was easy to finger what went wrong. Coach Jacques Nienaber’s decision to make 14 changes to the starting team and include four debutants on the bench meant that this was not an occasion when the South Africans had their feared Bomb Squad impact to call on.
Deon Fourie did make a huge impact when he came on, but apart from the Stormers loose-forward and Malcolm Marx when he came on immediately after halftime, there wasn’t no significant impact made by the reserves and it was then that Wales, profiting from a period where they had four penalties in a row in not many more minutes than that, forced the momentum shift that changed the game.