Cape Town – It is often said in rugby circles that with the Springboks, you may know what’s coming, but it’s another thing to stop them.
That is a reference to their box-kick strategy and using their maul and scrum to win penalties, but for the Bulls in Friday’s United Rugby Championship semi-final against Leinster, it will mean something very different.
The Irish province are masters at holding on to possession, and if the men from Pretoria are to have any chance of causing an upset at the RDS Arena (8.35pm SA time kickoff), they will have to stop Leinster in their tracks on attack, according to Marcell Coetzee.
“The thing with Leinster is that they play with incredible tempo. If you let them start well early in the game, after they play that expansive brand of rugby – guys running on to the ball, you are going to put yourself under pressure,” the Bulls captain said from Dublin this week.
“If you can’t maintain or sustain that during the first half or second half, the tackle-slips will come eventually because they try to outwork their opponents. You see it with their international team as well – the ball is not long at the breakdown and then it’s away.
“It’s all about preparing for that and backing your system. We’ve grown a lot since then, and our defence system has been looking after us well. We are still far from perfect, but we are striving to be better every day.
“But you can’t allow them to get that quick pace on the ball, with the playmakers that they have in the backline as well, like Johnny Sexton and Garry Ringrose – they will do their magic.”
The Bulls, though, have to put Leinster under pressure with ball-in-hand as well, where strike-runners such as Kurt-Lee Arendse, Canan Moodie, Madosh Tambwe and Cornal Hendricks will look to find gaps in the defence.
For them to even think about that, though, the South Africans must make sure that their sometimes wobbly scrum stands firm, and that they win their lineouts if they hope to turn things around from the 31-3 drubbing they received in Dublin last September.
“Whenever you play in the playoffs, the pillars of your success are your set-pieces. If your set-piece functions on the day, that’s something you can work from, and it can help you get into the right areas. We are working very hard on our set-pieces going into this game, and we’ve been doing well in that department throughout the season,” Coetzee said.
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“We just want to continue building on that. Still a lot of fixables that we identified from the Sharks game, but in any playoff, your set-pieces need to function so that you can have more control over the game to be in the right areas of the game – like we saw with that last drop goal.
“We got a penalty, got our lineout maul functioning, and we managed to build on that – that will be essential, like La Rochelle did against Leinster (in the Champions Cup final).
“If you take the context of the first game, there were some youngsters here who had never experienced the UK/Irish life, and also playing away – particularly a team like Leinster.
“It was a big shock to a lot of the guys… and we had just come up from a Currie Cup (title) as well. We’ve grown immensely during the tournament, and you’ve seen boys become men and guys playing exceptional rugby.
“We can only really answer that question when we play against them on Friday – to see how far we have come, and if you are going to grab that opportunity with both hands to maybe qualify for the final. Look, it’s playoffs, 50-50, and that’s how we see it.”
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