Johannesburg - Bulls captain Adriaan Strauss has admitted that his side were “not proud” of their performance at Loftus Versfeld on Saturday as they took a half century of points from a rampant Emirates Lions side at home.
According to SuperSport, The Bulls finished their first phase of this year’s Vodacom Super Rugby competition with their heads held in shame as they were blown off the park in comprehensive fashion by a Lions’ side at the top of their game.
In the process they lost two proud home records – one of them being the strange one of never having lost to the Lions at Loftus in Super Rugby while they were until this weekend also the only side to be unbeaten at home in the competition.
Strauss spoke earlier on in the week on how the pride was in the team at these records, even though they would mean little on the field, but after the game admitted this was definitely not a performance to be proud of.
“We are not proud of this performance, definitely not. We’ve shown throughout the season that we can play better rugby than this,” he said.
“So we have a good break now, we still have a lot to play for in this competition and we need to learn from this. There are not a lot of positives we can take out of this but we still need to learn from it and get better, and I believe we will.”
The Bulls captain said he was disappointed at how his team reacted to the pressure, especially after they shut out the Stormers the week before.
“We were definitely not at our best. We gave them easy turnovers and we didn’t hang onto the ball in contact situations. We let the ball slip out of our hands at times, and they were good at breakdown as well and creating legitimate turnovers. We need to give them credit it was a good performance by them, but as coach said we weren’t good enough. We didn’t pitch up the way we did last weekend,” he added.
“They were very good, they played a high-tempo game. We didn’t execute what we wanted to and the only thing that worked for us – the only positive- was the driving maul. Apart from that we gave them the opportunity to run at us, there was a lot of space for them and they made good decisions to run into space. I think their kicking game was good on the night as well. They were the better team on the night, they used the space better and we gave them the opportunities on the night.”
The teams now head into a break, but the Bulls know all too well they will need to find a way back from this. They at least have something to look up to – the Lions took 50 at home against the Hurricanes and returned better and more focused.
Can the Bulls do the same? Only time will tell for them.