No excuses for dreary Bulls showing, says annoyed Mitchell

Bulls coach John Mitchell was clearly in a black mood after his team’s lacklustre 42-37 defeat at the hands of the Sunwolves in Singapore at the weekend, laying the blame on poor conditioning and individual defensive errors.

“It’s very clear that this was a patch-up side with five of our forwards not fully fit after long-term injuries or suspension, but we threw it away. The decline in performance was because a lot of the team have not played a lot of rugby. But in this competition you can’t turn up after the June break overweight, like one forward did.

“Players missed tackles because they are short of match-fitness, these were failures in individual completion not system errors. Some guys are just not match-fit yet because they’ve come back from long-term injury. Hopefully everyone will now benefit from the run as we head into our next game,” Mitchell said after the loss, which means they are almost certainly out of Super Rugby playoff contention.

The loose trio of Hanro Liebenberg, Jannes Kirsten and Marco van Staden were all coming back after being injured for a long time, while prop Pierre Schoeman was suspended for six weeks. Johnny Kotze was filling in in midfield and Jamba Ulengo was playing his first Super Rugby game of the year.

Apart from the lethargy that was clearly evident on a swelteringly humid evening in the tropics, the Bulls hands also let them down with numerous clumsy mistakes.

“The humidity was always going to test our skills under pressure but we weren’t able to produce those skills under pressure. We made it difficult for ourselves by playing behind ourselves, but unless you win the gain-line and the frontline in those conditions it’s going to be costly.

“We chose to not stick to process, we got bored doing the simple things and you need your defence to stand up in conditions like that, but unfortunately we conceded four soft tries due to poor individual completion and that was game over,” Mitchell said.