South African Under 20 coach, Dawie Theron, expressed his satisfaction on the performance of his national training squad in their friendly match against the University of the Western Cape in Stellenbosch on Friday.
The SA Under 20’s won the match 65-7 after a half-time lead of 31-0.
Sport24
The young guns scored eleven tries and many of them came of well-worked structured play, something Theron was looking for this early in their campaign. This was the squad’s first match of their 2013 season.
The team will defend their IRB Junior World Championship title (won in Cape Town last year) in June in France.
“We had a couple of objectives from this. We have been together five days now, so we wanted to put out early markers of excellence. I am happy that we could do that. Our discipline was good and we kept to the structures we wanted. We defended well, created a lot of chances and finished them off.”
Theron gave most of his squad of 35 a run and with matches against Maties and UCT to follow next week, the coach will see all the players in camp in a match situation.
“I am pretty happy on where we are at this stage of our season, but the reality is that a lot of hard work still lies ahead,” Theron said.
SA Under-20’s point scorers:
Tries: Luther Obi, Jacques du Plessis (2), Jan Serfontein (2), Ruan Steenkamp, Dries Swanepoel, Tyler Fisher, Eugene Le Maitre, JP Lewis (2).
Conversions: Handré Pollard (3), Robert du Preez, Tim Swiel.
Lets hope they continue on an upward curve
A good result although difficult to know the quality of the opposition to put it into perspective as will be the case in their next two games but still good that they managed to play to some structure and score all those tries as the article says when they used so many different players in the match. Only one thing which I noticed on originally seeing the score was that they scored 11 tries but only converted 5, going through 3 kickers in the process – so seems this is an aspect they will need to work on too, need all the points you can get in a tournament situation. Wonder what each kicker’s success rate was.
Their defense in 2nd half was bad. They conceded 7
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