P Divvie stating the obvious said the Springboks have work to do on their scrum.

The Boks came off the first four-try bonus point win of this year’s Tri-Nations and is two points away from winning the Cup, all this with two games to go for the Boks. The Springboks scored two beautiful tries from first phase ball, a rarity in Rugby these days but faltered in the scrum, where the Wallaby front row forced them into error and conceding 15 penalties, a good number of these emanating from the set piece.

De Villiers had the following to say after the match: “We never had the platform to play off, but we still managed to play with the kind of ball we had.”

“Our defence was good, our kicking was outstanding, as it always is, and we passed the ball and scored four tries.”

He admitted there would be a review of his team’s scrum problems ahead of next weekend’s encounter with the Wallabies.

“We will definitely look [on video] at our scrums and see if we were hard done by or if we did anything bad, and then we try to improve on that one and set the platform there,” he said.

“I think we will be back [next week].”

People in the know in Australia has been hinting at the improving Wallaby front row for a while now, you hear words like ‘technically very good’ coupled with something like ‘lacking experience’ which over time can only improve. So, are we looking at a much improved Wallaby front row or are we suddenly seeing the weakness of a converted hooker at tighthead, as some pundits warned us about? I have also heard a lot about the impact a tighthead lock can have on the scrum, did everything go pear-shaped when Bekker came on? I will leave the technicalities to someone like Tighthead who already suggested we packing to high in the scrum. I assume the answer is a combination of all of the above, hopefully we have the knowhow in the Bok camp and it can be sorted out quickly.

P Divvie also did not let the opportunity slip to have a dig at his detractors and the ref:

“I said we could play total rugby and we did as the guys made brilliant decisions. When the space was there to run it we did,” De Villiers said.

“I was happy with the character they showed. There were a few calls that went against us, we were at sixes and sevens in the scrums and we didn’t know what would come next.”

“But we bounced above the situation and showed character to stand up as a team and to play with the scraps that we got.”

I hope the ‘quick fix’ for the front row is not seen as a friendly chat with the ref before the game! There are bigger problems than just that to work on.

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