Wounded Sharks will be a dangerous prospect for the Lions

A wounded Sharks team will be a very dangerous prospect for the Lions as they target a second straight win over their South African rivals when they battle it out in their United Rugby Championship (URC) derby at Kings Park on Saturday afternoon.

The Lions produced a stunning performance to thrash the Sharks 38-14 at Ellis Park over the past weekend, and are now preparing themselves for a backlash in the return fixture in Durban.

Lions lock Darrien Landsberg believes it is going to be an extremely tough encounter, despite the ease of their win last weekend, and that they will need to have the right mindset to contend with them.

Wounded Sharks

“The fact that they’re wounded, that in itself is a dangerous aspect. No team wants to have back-to-back losses against the same team within a week,” said Landsberg ahead of the match.

“More than anything they are going to be in front of their home crowd. I hear it is going to be a packed-out Kings Park, so they will not want to take another loss. For us we just have to go in with the right mindset and make sure that whatever we do we go and get the win.”

Landsberg admitted that the Lions showing a few days ago was spurred on by their poor performance against the Bulls at Loftus a week previously, and although they dominated the Sharks on the Highveld, they have to be even more physical this time round on their home turf.

“We were very happy (with the effort). We were a bit disappointed with ourselves after the Bulls performance, so it was definitely a game that we needed to rectify,” explained Landsberg.

“In the week we had set out a plan of action and you couldn’t have asked for a better execution of it, so big up for the boys for that one. But this week is a whole different challenge.

“It’s only a week turnaround. So I don’t think there is much that can really change. The only thing that can be a real point of difference is who is going to want it more and the effort that is going to be put into the collisions.

“The Sharks will feel like they were physically dominated. So they are definitely going to come out to prove a point. But that just pushes us more to up our physicality even more and prove that we can be even better than last week.”

The maul

The one part of their game that the Lions struggled a bit in was the maul, and Landsberg explained that they had been using that as motivation to try new things to get them over the try line.

“That’s just a mindset thing. I think going into each maul it’s about telling each other as a pack that we need to go and score. It has been a bit of a challenge (recently) as teams know it is a weapon of ours and are finding ways to stop it,” said Landsberg.

“Our plan is just to work around that, come together as a unit and make sure that we do end up getting points from the lineout.

“It has opened up variations and allowed us to look outside of the box for different plays that we want to do and teams aren’t even expecting it. The traditional ways (of mauling) aren’t always working, so we have to find other ways to get over the try line.”