White full of praise for Bulls players who ‘never lie down’

The sign of a champion team is that even in the most frustrating or seemingly hopeless times, they ban all thought of defeat and find a way to win.

The Bulls were that side as they snuck a 31-27 win over the Stormers at the death in their Rainbow Cup match at Loftus Versfeld on Friday night.

It was more a case of frustration than hopelessness for the Bulls because they were clearly playing well enough to win comfortably, thoroughly dominating territory and possession. But like a tree dropping its leaves in autumn, their play was littered with mistakes – passes going astray, four tries disallowed due to errors in the build-up, and lineouts lost deep in the Stormers’ 22.

But still they found a way and they rescued their unbeaten run in Pretoria via lock Ruan Nortje, who was immense along with flank Marcell Coetzee, forcing his way over for their fourth try on the final hooter.

Coach Jake White was asked after the game if he ever thought his team were going to lose as the Stormers built up a 17-7 halftime lead. His response was telling:

“No, we don’t think like that. You’ve got to believe you’re going to win and I saw it in the players’ eyes after I spoke to them at halftime that they believed in what I said that we will win this game,” White said.

“This team never lies down. It’s moments like these that you coach for – to come back from 7-17 down against a really classy side who have won twice in a row at the death before this match.

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“I think we were a bit naïve when we had only 13 players against us, the ball went wide too quickly, maybe because it was two backline players yellow-carded. But we couldn’t just go around them and we got caught a few times because they defended very well and caught us behind the advantage line.

“As soon as we became more direct, going through the middle to compress the defence, we opened them up.”

The Bulls were in position for their last-ditch win thanks to a scrum penalty won in the closing stages, and White said he was pleased with the way his team managed to keep the powerful Stormers scrum at bay.

“I said after our last game that we would sort the scrum out and we took their power away there today by going channel one and getting the ball out quickly,” White said.

“As the Bulls, we like to scrum and get first-phase dominance, but we showed great tactical awareness and game management there by keeping away from scrumming. And when we needed one at the end, we got the penalty.

“You don’t want to win like that but the guys really stuck at it. We had a lot of opportunities, four tries were disallowed, but we made it hard for ourselves.”

Stormers coach John Dobson said he was proud of his team for denying the Bulls for so long, even though they had little more than 20% of territory and possession.

“We made more than 250 tackles at altitude, which shows huge character and I’m very happy with the conditioning, and the attack did some good things. To come up here and compete was great, but we are devastated to not close out the game and the changeroom is heartbroken,” Dobson said.