Physicality. That word is becoming an overused cliche in the Vodacom United Rugby Championship this season.
But for a team like Connacht, that word is all they’re talking about ahead of their trip to Loftus Versfeld.
Connacht’s assistant coach, Dewald Senekal, South African-born and tough as nails, has been drumming it into them ahead of their game against the Vodacom Bulls on Friday night, and after two lacklustre physical performances against Ulster and the Stormers, he knows they need to step up.
“One of the frustrations for us coming out of that Ulster game is that we weren’t physical enough as a pack of forwards,” Senekal told Irish journalists on Monday.
“As a team, there was some real opportunities to stamp a mark on that game and show our physicality and we missed some of those. We had a real challenge in our review of the Ulster game as a pack around our physicality.
“We’re in the land of physicality. We need to be present. It’s not always a size thing, it’s intent. We need to stop being the nice Connacht Irish boys that are fair play.
“We need to really try and impose ourselves – have that intent to clean someone to the floor, hit them hard when they’re giving us open ribs or something, within the laws of the game obviously.
“I definitely believe it’s a mindset and that’s where we’ve challenged ourselves. I felt that in stages in the Stormers performances, there were hints of it and we’re getting there. It doesn’t come naturally to our boys but I definitely believe there was a step up there. I did thank them for that this week.”
Senekal said the challenge would be even tougher against the Bulls at altitude.
“Now we’re going to Loftus. Even within South African terms, they’re known as a side who want to impose themselves and are often regarded as 'bullies'. They haven’t forgotten what happened last year at the Sportsground so they know what’s coming. Now it’s really up to us to fly through the storm and meet the challenge head-on.”
“We can’t shy away from it because for me that’s the real part of taking the next step as a team. Even against a tough side, we need to be present on Friday night again and not choose our battles.”
Discipline has been a big downfall for Connacht in their two games thus far, conceding 30 penalties in the two outings and Senekal is demanding a better performance at Loftus Versfeld.
“For us, the frustration is that there’s a lot of similar types of penalties,” said Senekal.
“We had three penalties for not rolling away, so we needed to quickly adapt to the interpretation of the referee. We knew he was really hot on that. Sometimes you get caught and don’t react fast enough.
“I’ve never coached someone to lift a leg in maul defence in my life but we’ve been penalised three times for that. That’s also something referees are looking for at the moment. So that’s really the frustration and we as a team have to own that, and as coaches as well.
“We need to quickly move on from that because we’re in South Africa...you can’t win a game away from home giving up 15 or 16 penalties. It’s impossible to do that so we have to make better decisions with situational intelligence.
“We didn’t have as many warm-up games as we were hoping to because of a few cancellations and those are little things that you normally make mistakes on in warm-up games but now it’s costing us in the URC.
“So from Friday, we need to be really spot on with that because we know it’s tough to win away from home.”