Boks need to focus on restoring pride

AFTER their total humiliation in North Harbour, the Springboks would have welcomed last weekend’s rest, which enabled them to draw breath and contemplate what went so horribly wrong against the All Blacks.

Having lost 57-0 to the best team on the planet, the Boks do not have much time to come up with a winning remedy before they face New Zealand in the return fixture on October 7.

In between, they will have a match against the Wallabies in Bloemfontein on Saturday to try to rebuild their shattered confidence.

That, of course, is easier said than done and Bok coach Allister Coetzee will be hoping the scars inflicted at North Harbour are not deep and permanent.

The game in Albany went down in the record books for all the wrong reasons.

Conceding 57 unanswered points was worse than the 57-15 drubbing handed out in Durban last year, and a worse losing margin than the 53-3 defeat by England in 2002.

Can the Boks turn it around in Cape Town?

Despite the one-sided scoreline, the outplayed Boks did create some opportunities with their backs, but they were unable to finish off against a water-tight defence.

That will give the Boks something positive to draw from, but it will require one of the biggest comebacks in sporting history to reverse their fortunes.

Coetzee says the Boks have no option but to fight back, and the test against the Wallabies, who held his team to a draw in Australia, will be a starting point.

A defeat against the Wallabies hardly bears thinking about and Coetzee knows that nothing less than a win will be good enough to save face after the All Blacks pasting.

Coetzee has already called for an error-freeze, saying that the punishment for mistakes against the All Blacks is always swift and brutal.

At least in Cape Town, the Boks will be able to call on the backing of the majority of a sellout 52 000 crowd as they bid to stop the All Black juggernaut in its tracks.

Home or away, the current All Blacks are a frightening prospect for any team.

Coetzee and his team will need to rid themselves of that fear, knuckle down and concentrate on the sizeable task of restoring lost national pride.