Sabre rattling spurs Boks
LONDON: The Springboks have taken note of the confident talk emanating from the Wales camp about their chances of winning Saturday’s World Cup quarter-final, and it clearly has added fuel to the Boks’ motivational fires.
Welsh captain Sam Warburton said his team knew how to beat the Boks, having won the last encounter between the teams in Cardiff and almost beating the Boks in Nelspruit in June last year.
“We hear that, but we are just as confident that we can beat them – it works both ways,” assistant coach John McFarland said tersely before adding: “Next question…”
The fact is that over 100 years of Tests between the countries, the Boks have won 27 times, Wales just twice, and there has been one draw. The average score is 27-14 to the Boks.
“If you analyse those three games we played against them last year, we scored 11 tries to their four and we were understrength when we played them in Cardiff,” he said.
“We have conceded just one try in our last three World Cup games, and one of them came from an intercept. We are in a really good space going into the quarter-finals.”
But McFarland gave credit where it was due, and said Wales played their part in a “brilliant” game of rugby against Australia at Twickenham at the weekend.
“That was sheer entertainment, really gripping stuff,” he said.
“A lot has been said about Wales’s inability to score when they had the two-man advantage for close to 10 minutes, but you have to appreciate they were close to the goal-line and those were 5m situations.
“So when you’re defending on the line, you don’t have to have any sweepers, so you can put men in the line. Wales would probably have wanted to attack from a little deeper,” McFarland said.
He said the coaching staff had noted that Australia had to make almost double the tackles the Welsh made, and were rocked by the physicality of their opponents.
“There are obviously some clips from that game that we will be showing our players to remind them that we are in for one heck of a battle,” he said.