Jake White said the Vodacom Bulls have jeopardised their chances of hosting a home play-off in the Vodacom URC after failing to finish off the Glasgow Warriors yesterday.
The Warriors fell short with a second-half comeback as the Bulls won 40-34 in Pretoria. Trailing 37-10 entering the final quarter, the league leaders scored three tries in eight minutes to raise hopes of extending their winning run in the URC to seven games.
A Chris Smith penalty put the Bulls out of reach and inflicted on Glasgow a first loss in the competition since December, but the tourists’ dazzling play after the hour mark and three points from Duncan Weir with the last kick of the game secured them two bonus points.
The Bulls remain in the top four of the overall standings but only six points separate White’s charges and rivals, the DHL Stormers, in fifth position with two rounds left in the regular season.
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“They play Zebre twice and let’s be fair, Zebre have won one and drawn one, last year they didn’t win a game. So if you look at the log and you have Edinburgh and Zebre playing Zebre twice – and I’m not knocking them – Zebre, historically, the last several years have struggled.
“If they [Glasgow] win, in effect that’s 10 points they get out of the Zebre game.
“We’ve [still] got Sharks away and they could be European Cup champions by the time we get there, and Benetton have had our number in the Rainbow Cup and a lot of their players play in the Six Nations.
“I don’t for one minute think we’ve done enough. We’ve got to make sure we play our best rugby by the time we get to the backend of the competition, and it’s now.”
The URC’s two top try-scoring sides this season put on the show at Loftus, with the defences breached eight times. White, in the build-up to the clash, had his fingers crossed that the high-flying Warriors would wilt at altitude, but attributed their riposte to the Bulls not landing the killer blow.
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“That’s just because we were poor, we gave them that. Like anything, you can be as tired as you are but if you get a chance to score and win, you find a second wind,” the director of rugby said.
“It’s like the Comrades: you’re walking and walking and all of a sudden cut-off time comes and you start jogging again.
“There’s no doubt that altitude plays a factor; five times their hooker laid down two metres from the try line [and] that’s because of altitude. [But] part of it was what we did, we gave them the ball and let them grow another leg, which happens in sport.
“It’s definitely an advantage [for us playing at altitude], no doubt in my mind. Playing at 14:00, it’s going to catch you; we probably never used it as best as we could.
“When we had them by the throat we should’ve finished them off, and in some ways that’s naivety, some ways it’s inexperience, and in some ways it’s the experience of Glasgow understanding that. It was a little bit of everything.”
This article first appeared in SA Rugby magazine.
