Jacques Nienaber admits to being tired of Bok’s criticisms

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The Springboks’ conservative approach to play is once again in the spotlight with their head coach Jacques Nienaber admitting that defending their style of play becomes tedious.

The world champions have come under heavy criticism after their low-risk game plan in which they strike for territory and keep the ball predominantly among their forwards helped them win the Series 2-1 against the Lions. British and Irish people last month.

Steve Hansen’s review

Former All Blacks head coach Steve Hansen recently criticized the product delivered by the Boks and Lions in these tests and said most rugby fans are not interested in this style of rugby.

You have two big packs and two coaches who have no faith in what will happen if they throw the ball, so they just got into a fight, Hansen told Newstalk ZB.

Let’s slow down the ball, get up, do everything we can to make sure our defensive line is stable so that we can keep hitting.

It’s not a game that everyone wants to watch. Yes, we want a good physical competition, that’s what the game is about physics, speed, use of the ball and skill. Could you say we saw this in this series? Of course, we didn’t. And that discouraged a lot of people.

South Africa currently lead the Rugby Championship standings and their pragmatic approach to the game has produced excellent results in recent years. Besides their series victory over the Lions, they also won the Rugby Championship and the World Cup in 2019.

When asked if he was fed up with criticism of his teams’ tactics, Nienaber replied: Yes. To be fair, I didn’t see the comment. With everything that’s happened to us and the quarantine stuff and us doing our review and having our goal for this week and what we need to produce as a team, I haven’t seen Steves’ comments.

But for me on styles of play, like I said in the past, each team has their own team, has their own set of skills and will have their own athletic ability and DNA and they will play towards what strengths (sic) their DNA.

That’s the beauty of rugby. These are the different styles and different ways of winning tryouts. You play what you see in front of you and then you have to adapt to that.

South Africa’s game plan stands in stark contrast to that of their big New Zealand rivals and they are set to face each other in the Rugby Championship in Townsville on September 25 and on the Gold Coast on October 2.

The last time these teams met was at the World Cup in Japan in 2019 with the All Blacks claiming a 23-13 victory and Nienaber believes this tournament has shown that every test they have taken part in. allowed the Boks to use different tactics.

In 2019 I don’t want to come back to it all the time, but in the quarter-finals we faced one of the most exciting and attacking teams in Japan, he said.

Then in the semi-final we had to adapt and change the way we play to play against Wales and it was pretty much this massive showdown. Then we played in England, which was probably a good mix between the two, between Japan and Wales.

They had a good kicking game, a good defense system, put pressure on you in various ways. Not that the others don’t but like I said each team has their own DNA and your ability to adapt to that and also play with your strengths and your DNA, pretty much every team of the world will do it.

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