Lions aim to be more ruthless in goal zone against Scarlets

The Lions will be targeting a more ruthless performance when they enter the opposition’s 22m area as they aim to get their United Rugby Championship (URC) campaign off the ground when they battle it out against Scarlets in Wales on Saturday night.

The Lions outscored the Stormers five tries to four in their opening match of the URC season, but still went down 35-33.

Then, despite arguably having the better of the play in their games against Edinburgh and Benetton in Scotland and Italy over the past two weekends, they have suffered 17-16 and 15-10 defeats respectively, which has left them winless from their opening three matches.

The Lions are thus desperate to pick up a win against Scarlets this weekend and are targeting a better showing when in the opposition 22m to get the points needed to get them over the line.

Goal zone entries

“What we call the goal zone (opposition 22m) has been a big area of focus for us over the past two weeks. Over the past weekend we had seven goal zone entries and only came away with 10 points from that,” explained Lions prop Asenathi Ntlabakanye.

“For us that’s not good enough as players. So we look at ourselves and we know that is something we have to work on going into the next game.

“To be granted so many entries into the opposition’s 22m we have to find a way to capitalise and I am sure the boys will find a way to do that.”

Platform

All of the losses so far were by small margins, with the Lions in the game until the final whistle, so they will be eager to turn things around against Scarlets and they will be aiming for a big effort from the forwards to set up that platform.

“I think our scrums have been good (this season), but I think we can still take it a step up and that’s something we want to do this weekend,” said Ntlabakanye.

“But we are definitely confident that we can turn things around. If you look at the three losses they were all tight, so it’s a game of (small) margins and if things had gone our way we could have been three (wins) out of three.

“So we have a huge belief that we can turn things around and this weekend is another great opportunity for us to go out there and get a positive result.”