Springbok centre Damian de Allende would have gone through a kaleidoscope of different emotions when he watched his teammates lose 38-22 to the Wallabies in the opening Castle Lager Rugby Championship game at Emirates Airlines Park last week.
Initially he would have felt what most of us sitting not far away from him in the press box would have been thinking - this was a statement Bok performance that would reverberate around the rugby world. When the hosts were 22-0 up after 17 minutes they had hardly put a foot wrong and everyone was working for them.
They had the perfect mix to their game, with the first try scored by Kurt-Lee Arendse by the South Africans winning the first aerial battle against the Australian fullback Tom Wright. Siya Kolisi’s team won five of the first six aerial battles and it was a big part of their impressive early assault.
But while De Allende would, like the rest of us, have sat back in anticipation of the Boks continuing with that strategy and would have been wondering what score the world champions would win by, at the end of the game the same Wright who had been culpable in setting the Boks up for their first try was running over for his team’s sixth try to put the seal on an amazing win.
The frustration that De Allende and the other watching Boks would have been acute, but on Saturday the double World Cup winner has a chance to set what happened right. At the same time, he is not losing sight of one thing - unlike many fans who allowed the emotion of the defeat and what happened at the end to cause some amnesia when it came to the early parts of the game, De Allende has not forgotten the positives of what went before.
CAN DRAW POSITIVES FROM STRONG OPENING
The period when the Boks were reading the Australian plays perfectly, when they were cutting down the danger-man Will Skelton with low tackles that prevented him from getting any momentum and negating the threat of the dangerous Joseph Suaali, is something he thinks the Boks can build on when they get a chance to avenge the defeat at the DHL Stadium in Cape Town on Saturday.
“We were sitting in the stadium watching and I will be honest, we thought flip we are going to put on a big score in this game,” said De Allende.
“We were really good then, and there was a lot of positive. Obviously it was tough to watch after that opening 17 and 18 minutes. It just felt like after the way we started the way we finished didn’t look like us and that was the frustrating part for a player who is part of the squad.
"But we have chatted about it a lot this week and after a lot of long meetings we have gotten to the bottom of it and we know what we have to rectify.”
The consensus coming out of the Bok camp is not dissimilar to the line in most of the local media - the Boks, having been seduced by the ease with which they rollicked into their 22-0 lead, simply overplayed after that. As De Allende says, the thoughts started to move to how much they could win by, and that might have contributed to why the Boks were so frenetic.
“It’s not difficult to establish what went wrong for us, we simply ran ourselves off our own feet,” said coach Rassie Erasmus during the team announcement press conference on Tuesday.
LOOKING FORWARD TO PLAYING AGAINST SUAALI
However, while acknowledging that they conspired against themselves in Johannesburg, the Boks were also ready to give Australia credit, and there is one visiting player in particular that De Allende is looking forward to pitting himself against in Cape Town - the former Australian Rugby League star Suaali, a player that De Allende has long admired.
“I think he’s very agile and explosive and he gets up in the air very well, very easily and very high,” De Allende said.
“He does very well to keep the ball alive, especially in contact, and that’s what they do well in Rugby League as well. For us this weekend, it’s just to make sure that we can take his pace away, but take it away together, not individually. He’s been cool to watch (since switching to rugby union and becoming a Wallaby player.
"He almost reminds me a bit of watching Israel Folau. He just brings that different dynamic to the Australian team.”
FANS REACTED DIFFERENTLY TO THIS DEFEAT
The 33-year-old product of the city that the test will be played in on Saturday who is nearing 100 appearances for his country has been through many ebbs and flows as a Bok, and was part of the team that lost the first test under the coaching of Allister Coetzee at the former Cape Town rugby headquarters of Newlands.
"That was the first game against the Boks Ireland ever won in South Africa, but while Australia broke their own drought by winning in Johannesburg for the first time in 62 years, De Allende feels the public reaction has been different this time.
“Our supporters are a lot more positive than when we lost to Ireland in Cape Town in 2016, where we had fans swearing at us when we were walking to the gym,” he said.
“Obviously we’re very disappointed in what happened on Saturday, but we’re also disappointed because we know we let the fans down. So it does help us when we’re walking to the gym and the fans are a lot more positive. We know we’re nothing without the fans.”
De Allende will be reuniting with skipper for the day Jesse Kriel in the midfield as they play together for a record 38th time and that should bring some stability to the Boks at the back and there’s plenty of extra experience at the back for this game.
One thing is for sure, De Allende, like most players do, will prefer being on the field and having a hand in the team’s fortunes than being powerless in the stands watching the wheels come off what was initially a statement performance.