@Smuts said in All Blacks vs Springboks II:
@pakman said in All Blacks vs Springboks II:
@mariner4life said in All Blacks vs Springboks II:
I didn't watch yesterday, so knowing the score and reading the thread I actually expected much worse.
I thought at half time both coaches would have been very happy. We were by far the better team, imposed ourselves and were in front. They had been outplayed but were close.
Absolute horror show last quarter for us. Absolutely sublime for South Africa. Well done to them I'm very fucking impressed.
The ABs were the better team for first 60.
Let’s stop this idea right here. You were in the game but you were hardly on top.
Your scrum was … under pressure, your lineout was creaking, you were losing the tactical kicking game and the aerial battle and you’d managed a solitary try (requiring 2 or 3 pieces of exceptional skill) at the cost of your playmakers taking a battering and gifting us a try. Reptitive creamings caused Least Useless Barrett to set up deeper and deeper. By the end of the half, it was hard to see where the forces of darkness might generate net points.
The good guys on the other hand could look at that half and say they just needed to keep dancing with them that brung em.
They’d bombed three clear chances without doing anything all that miraculous, one of which got called back after it was converted and another was only stopped by a sensational last gasp tackle over the try line. All while rejigging their backline to deal with injuries.
They also knew that sooner or later their work in the scrum was going to pay dividends, on the scoreboard and by opening holes around the park.
So 10-7 was a fairish reflection though not a good indicator of how the work done in the first half was likely to play out in the second.
Had a re-watch last night and I think this is a very fair assessment.
Boks dominated territory and possession in the first half. They made lots of errors, but we struggled to get out of our own half and the scrum was under major pressure from about 20 minutes onwards.
We really only got in a postion to score three times in the first half. First time - Carter did. Seond time, Billy needed to sell a dummy and give us a three on one to score - instead he threw an intercept (probably a 14 pointer). And the third time our attacking lineout shat the bed and gave away an easy exit.
Second half, nothing much went right and I suspect we paid the price for doing more defending in the first half and running out of legs - but also reverting to a bunch of low percentage plays in the last 10 minutes trying to grab a bit of respectability back. In the circumstances, bringing on Kirifi for Sititi and leaving Parker out there was "sub-optimal". Reality overtook the plan.
But after a second watch, it's the set piece at the root of the problems. Aided and abetted by some headless chickenry. We piggy-backed the boks at times, but the set piece malfunctions were often the first phase of the piggy back.
Aerial battle was lost on the back of the Boks having most of the momentum. They weren't exactly climbing in the air and catching everything - but, if you're on the front foot and going forwards, a ball that goes loose is more often than not going to bounce favourably for you.
Springboks
