Scarred Jaguares feel the Lions’ locomotive breath
THE brakes have fallen off this runaway train called the Lions and it will take an immovable object to prevent them from making the Super Rugby play-offs for the first time or even topping the South African conference they lead.
Everything they touched turned into magic dust, except for their goal-kicking. With their eight-try win, the Lions inflicted on the Jaguares their worst defeat of their debut season.
The Jaguares and discipline go together like electricity and water. The visitors slashed themselves worse than Shi’a Muslims with their overexuberance at the breakdown and Stuart Berry regularly pinged them.
However, Elton Jantjies’s goal-kicking, unaided by the knee injury on his planting foot, wasn’t at the level that would leave Ireland trembling this winter.
He missed a few penalties in the first half, a conversion and a drop goal and, later, Ruan Combrinck was handed the kicking duties.
There was nothing wrong with Jantjies’s handling and field kicking, though, and he used those skills to set up the Lions’ third try in the first half by putting Lourens Erasmus in for his first Super Rugby try.
The Lions got off to their customary quick-fire start when Howard Mnisi’s 40m midfield break put the home side in the red zone.
Their smart handling led to Courtnall Skosan, who grabbed a pair on the night, scoring the opener after four minutes.
Another line break, this time by fullback Jaco van der Walt, who sadly limped off the field at half time, set up Lionel Mapoe for his most sumptuous try of the season. He’s scored eight so far, including a hat-trick against the Blues last week. But that one had shades of Jaque Fourie doing the same thing here for the Lions in his heyday.
There isn’t an outside centre who holds a candle to Mapoe in South Africa at the moment, and you’d be hard-pressed to find one playing better than him overseas.
It was a Jantjies side-step — so good you could hang it on your bedroom wall — that heralded the start of the second half followed by an offload that set Cyle Brink through.
What followed was pure carnage as the Lions scored four more tries — through a Combrinck double, Jaco Kriel and Skosan — as the Jaguares’s remains lay strewn on the tracks.