‘Punch in the face’ can be blessing in disguise

CJ STANDER believes the loss to the Blues could be the “punch in the face” the tourists need to kick start their tour of New Zealand.

Munster No.8 Stander, who scored the Lions’ only try at Eden Park, said: “Sometimes when teams score a try like that you just say well done, great try, you can't really stop it. We knew it was going to come.

“We let ourselves down a bit there. We gave them an easy out to get to that opportunity to get that try. It’s something we can learn and fix.

“Sometimes you need to get a punch in the face and take a step back and say ‘look, we need to improve on this and move on’.

“It’s not what we prepared for but look, as I said, sometimes you get a knock in the face and you need to take a step back and come back stronger.

“There was a lot of heads down but everyone knows we can improve on this and move forward and always say we can’t go back there.”

Despite defeat head coach Warren Gatland is confident it was another good step in preparation ahead of the Test Series which starts on June 24.

“It’s a big improvement from the first game,” he said. “It was a close game but the number of penalties hurt us, cost us momentum in the game.

“But there’s lots of positives and our setpiece was good but we need to control the number of penalties we give away in the game. That’s an area we will address.

“We have to make sure we control things that are in our control. We must half our penalty count.

“I don’t think there will be much of a difference between Super Rugby sides and the All Blacks. It’s going to give us great preparation playing at this level and learning from these hard competitive games.

“Winning games by 60 or 70 points isn’t good preparation – this is good preparation.”