Ken Borland

Connacht, aided by the wind at their backs, broke free in the second half of their United Rugby Championship match against the Bulls at The SportsGround in Galway to turn a 10-7 halftime lead into a thumping 34-7 win on Friday night.

While the Bulls certainly rattled the home side in the first half, scoring first and causing their defence many anxious moments, their inability to adapt at the breakdowns and their inaccuracy in that key department gave Connacht too much free turnover ball and the Irish side were slick in capitalising. The Bulls were too quick to go off their feet at the rucks and were heavily penalised.

“We had enough chances in the first half and in the second half we were up against it because they understand how to play here with the wind pumping and the rain coming down, we struggled to get up the hill, there’s a significant rise and a slope down there in the corner where we got trapped,” Bulls coach Jake White said after the game.

“But we’ve got to adapt, there were a couple of calls that went against us, they had the rub of the green like winning a vital toss in cricket, but we turned ball over in our own half.

“It’s all about learning how to adapt to another environment, it’s as simple as that. The reality is we were not good in conditions that did not suit us, we weren’t accurate, we lost a lot of ball at the back of rucks.

“We’re away from home and we just have to learn and find a way to win. You could see the spring in Connacht’s step when they were 10-7 up at halftime and they knew we had not done enough in the first half,” White said.

Frustrated by how often they were penalised at the attacking breakdown, the Bulls called into service the box-kick in the second half, but that did not go well as Connacht counter-attacked superbly through elusive wing Mack Hansen and powerhouse inside centre Tom Daly.

A dreadful basic error early in the second half by scrumhalf Zak Burger at the base of a scrum put Connacht immediately on attack and Daly muscled over for a try. But the killer blow came in the 49^th minute when Hansen scored off a kick with a brilliant mazy run. There was a hint of obstruction in the try, but the officials allowed it to stand after watching replays, having ruled out a Connacht try in the first half for a marginal forward pass.

“Marcell Coetzee did ask the referee and some might argue that Lizo Gqoboka was obstructed. But we don’t want to be box-kicking and giving the ball away.

“We’ve got to find other ways to score points and not just rely on that and getting calls at scrums and mauls. But it’s so tough over here and at times we played really well, but our decision-making and accuracy needs to be better, especially on our carries and at the breakdown,” White said.

Scorers

Connacht – Tries: Tiernan O’ Halloran, Tom Daly (2), Mack Hansen, Tom Farrell. Conversions: Jack Carty (3). Penalty: Carty.

Bulls – Try: Lizo Gqoboka. Conversion: Johan Goosen.

GQEBERHA, Eastern Cape – Malcolm Mitchell dared to take Driver on a dozen holes on Friday in the second round of the Vodacom Origins of Golf Series at Humewood Golf Club and quickly reaped the rewards as he raced up the leaderboard with a five-under-par 67 lifting him into a share of the lead heading into Saturday’s final round.

The wind was still up on Friday but Mitchell dropped just one stroke on his way to a total of four-under-par after the first two rounds, tied with 27-year-old Richard Joubert and veteran Hennie Otto.

Collecting six birdies, three on each loop, suggests an aggressive approach by the former Eisenhower Cup representative, but apart from backing himself with Driver, Mitchell felt his strategy was pretty risk-free.

“The two parts of my game that have been good for a while have been my driving and putting, which really helps on a links course. There were only two holes where I did not take Driver, but I’ve only missed four or five fairways on the first two days, so I’ve pretty much always been in a good position and my putting has been very good over the last while.

“In terms of being aggressive, in the moment there might be one shot that I might feel I can have a go at, but then there are others where I’ll aim 20 feet right or short. So I don’t go at it too much, I don’t change game-plans and I just try to stay in the moment and enjoy it,” Mitchell said after his round.

And being focused on the present and having fun is exactly what Mitchell will be doing in the final round, having learnt some lessons from his runners-up finish in August in the SunBet Challenge at Wingate Park Country Club in Pretoria. In that tournament he also went low in the second round, a 65 lifting him to second, but then he closed with a 72 to leave him three adrift of Estiaan Conradie.

“It’s funny how life teaches you different things. You work so hard to stay in the present but then sometimes you mess it up and get ahead of yourself or start thinking of the past. But winning three times in 2019 always sits there. Those memories are there to go back on, they can only help. It means I’ve been there, even though it was the Big Easy Tour, and knowing how to win definitely sticks in the back of your mind,” Mitchell said.

One man who is unlikely to have any trembling knees if he stays in contention on Saturday is Otto, because he has done it all before with 13 wins on the Sunshine Tour, the most recent being at the Sibaya Challenge in October 2019. The 45-year-old also finished in a tie for second in the Vodacom Origins of Golf event at Sishen at the end of August.

Otto has had a run of four successive top-30 finishes on tour and the former SA Open champion was looking dangerous as he fired a four-under-par 68 on Friday.

Joubert was just one stroke off the lead after the first round and, starting on the 10^th, he soared into the lead with an eagle on the par-five 11^th and then holed out for an eagle-two at the par-four 16^th. Bogeys at 17 and 18 undid some of that amazing work though, and he dropped two more shots on the front nine, but finishing with three straight pars gave him a 71 and he is far from done-and-dusted in this race.

Overnight leader Tristen Strydom shot a 73 on Friday and is one stroke back on three-under for the tournament, alongside Michael Palmer (68) and Daniel Greene (69).

There are three golfers two shots back on two-under-par who will need to be watched carefully as well – Christiaan Basson (68), Jean Hugo, who fired a brilliant 66, and Jayden Schaper (69).

The Springboks may have been conned into deviating from their strengths a bit in their two losses to the Wallabies, but their determination to build on what they did in their narrow loss to New Zealand last weekend will have been boosted by the three changes the All Blacks have made to their backline for Saturday’s Rugby Championship Test on the Gold Coast.

South Africa have spent this week stubbornly refusing to deviate from their plan despite mounting criticism from doe-eyed lovers of ball-in-hand rugby that kicking the ball away in the last 10 minutes was what cost them a 19-17 defeat at the death.

The All Blacks have changed their wings, with Sevu Reece and Rieko Ioane now set to face the aerial bombardment, and have chosen a scrumhalf with an even stronger kicking game in Brad Weber.

“We back our style and our physical presence, and we have great leaders we trust. We have full confidence in our plan and we want to rock up and play great rugby,” prop Steven Kitshoff said this week.

“We believe our DNA is good enough to win big matches, so on Saturday we want to really pitch up and play dominant rugby.”

Perhaps the key work-on for the Springboks, however, is ensuring that the chances that arise from their superb pressure game are utilised better on Saturday, especially in the closing stages. “We had a lot of opportunities and some crucial moments didn’t go our way,” Kitshoff admitted.

Sunny and warm conditions, with a bit of wind, on the Gold Coast on Saturday could also help the Springboks’ kicking game because sweat from what coach Jacques Nienaber described as “the biggest Test of the year, the same intensity as the World Cup final”, combined with sub-tropical humidity could make handling the ball when hundreds of kilogrammes of South African beef are bearing down on you rather tricky.

Nienaber also said South Africa’s strategy was conditional on how the All Blacks chose to defend. But even with three different players in their backline, New Zealand are unlikely to change from the packed frontline of 14 defenders and just one at the back that they had last weekend.

Springbok captain Siya Kolisi has enjoyed an excellent success rate as skipper of the national side over the last two years, but back-to-back losses have cut into his winning record a bit, if not his positivity.
Kolisi belatedly took over the captaincy in 2018 in one of Rassie Erasmus’s first masterstrokes and his record that year was understandably mixed given the depths to which Springbok rugby had sunk. In that first year South Africa won seven and lost six of their Tests under Kolisi.
But 2019 was nothing short of a triumph as the Springboks only lost one of their seven Tests with the then-Stormers flank at the helm. Five wins from eight Tests this year sees Kolisi’s overall winning ratio slip to 64%, pretty much on level terms with Jean de Villiers.

The last time South Africa lost successive Tests was back in 2018 – against Argentina in Mendoza and Australia in Brisbane, and then versus New Zealand at Loftus Versfeld and England at Twickenham. But with the losses against the Wallabies coming after two years of success and expectation, one might have thought these are the toughest times of Kolisi’s captaincy.

But Kolisi’s attitude is always team first and the 30-year-old is focused on how the team can get better.

“This has not been the most difficult time in my captaincy, although obviously it is very disappointing. But we have faced tougher challenges. I just try to take it week-by week, obviously you don’t want to lose two in a row. So our focus is on what we have done wrong and how we can improve.

“We’ve messed things up ourselves and the things we are normally good at we got wrong. So the focus is on our plan, what we are good at. We want to play our own style at our own pace. The last two weeks have been tough, but the biggest thing is that we get all our stuff right this weekend,” Kolisi said.

Kolisi was at the front of the Springboks again when they ran out to face the All Blacks haka with his usual intense stare. But within those muscular, powerful bodies, as tough and tenacious as a Staffy, beat hearts like the normal human being and the team know how important their success is to millions back at home.

“We can’t lie about it, we know how important rugby is, we know what people at home are expecting and want to see. That’s what we think about in our rooms, and it’s important to us too. We use that energy to focus on our game, it motivates us although we always give everything we can on the field,” Kolisi said.