Nienaber says All Blacks defeat in the past, as Boks’ focus shifts to Argentina

Springbok coach Jacques Nienaber says his team have identified what went wrong in last Saturday’s Rugby Championship Test against the All Blacks in Auckland and are determined to get back to winning ways when they take on Argentina in Joburg next weekend.

The Boks crashed 35-20 to the All Blacks, a week after smashing the Wallabies at Loftus Versfeld.

For the Boks to win the competition they will have to beat Los Pumas with a bonus point and hope the Wallabies beat the All Blacks in Melbourne and deny them a bonus point.

‘Honest assessment’

Nienaber said on Friday, two days after the Boks got together to kick off preparations for next Saturday’s Test at Ellis Park, that the Bok squad had done a proper assessment of the match in Auckland.

“The last two days were very important in the sense that we had a chance to do an honest assessment about what went wrong against New Zealand and to identify what we need to correct in our game going into our final match of the competition and the World Cup warm-up games,” said Nienaber.

“We were bitterly disappointed with last week’s performance, and we are well aware of the fact that we can’t make the same errors if we want to get our season back on track and build momentum.”

‘Hit the ground running’

With the team’s debrief following the New Zealand Test now concluded, as well as four training sessions and a few gym sessions in the bag, Nienaber added: “We’ve done everything we could to find solutions to the errors we made last week, and we’ve already started working on it at our field sessions, so we can now put that behind us and move forward.

“When we reassemble on Sunday our focus will be purely on Argentina, so we’ll hit the ground running again from Monday.”

The Springboks will continue their preparations in Pretoria early in the week before making the short trip to Johannesburg on Wednesday where they will wrap up their on-field work for the match.