The Springboks will stick to their plan for the Castle Lager Rugby Championship, irrespective of the fact that they lost to the All Blacks in Auckland last weekend.
And while the Rugby Championship may be lost and the focus will now begin to shift to the World Cup, that is no guarantee that some of the Springbok squad members who haven’t got a chance to play yet will be given a shot in Johannesburg.
The test, which is the final one in South Africa before three warm-up games abroad, will see the Boks look to start building their momentum and make some final tweaks before the World Cup squad is announced on 8 August.
“The plan will stay the same with the Argentina test. Our main thing will be to manage the load between the players in the games we have available. Obviously our primary objective was to win the Rugby Championship but that is not in our hands anymore,” coach Jacques Nienaber said.
“Australia must do us a favour - but the main objective was to manage everybody’s game time and give them a shot on the field.
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“It would have been the same no matter what. The team that we select for the Argentina game is a team that we believe will be good enough to beat Argentina, just as the team we selected to face New Zealand we thought would be good enough to beat New Zealand, as it was with Australia.”
While squad members such as Jesse Kriel, Trevor Nyakane, Herschel Jantjies and Jayden Hendrikse have not had game time yet this season for the Boks, Nienaber was at pains to say that the team imperatives come first, and thus some players may not get the chance to impress.
HIGHLIGHTS AND LOW POINTS
“Argentina have a specific skillset and game plan that they bring to the table, and that is different to New Zealand and Australia. So firstly we need to pick the right team to combat that and then maybe exploit potential weaknesses. We need to pick a team to exploit that. That is the first thing when it comes to team selection.
“But when there is a player who hasn’t had game time, we may give him some game time. But it is not say that the guys who haven’t played yet will definitely get a chance.”
Nienaber said while the team wasn’t happy about their first 20 minutes in Auckland that effectively cost them the test, they saw some positives out of the defeat.
“It is a bit of both - we are obviously concerned with the start but it was positive about how we clawed it back after the first 20 minutes. But obviously the first 20 minutes wasn’t nice to watch.
“Its never nice to lose a test, and I’m not really a very emotional guy - but I was disappointed after the loss against New Zealand. I always try and look at it as unemotionally as possible and I think the highlights and low points are easy to pick out. The first 20 minutes is a low point, especially in terms of how many mistakes we made, our discipline and the penalties we conceded.
“The highlights were the last 60 minutes when we came back into the game and we put ourselves in a position to try and win the game. Unfortunately we weren’t good enough to do that, even though we won the last 60 minutes 17-15. That isn’t the game though, the game is 80 minutes.”
The Boks will start their final build-up for the match on Monday, with the team announcement set for Tuesday.
“When we reassemble our focus will be purely on Argentina, so we’ll hit the ground running from Monday” - more here: https://t.co/EPLfi9OHku ??#Springboks #StrongerTogether pic.twitter.com/BhK3Tilsb6
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