Brenden Nel - SuperSport

Bloemfontein - Springbok captain John Smit painted a grim picture of his side’s prospects ahead of next year’s Rugby World Cup in New Zealand when he said they were “not good enough”.

The Bok captain expressed his disappointment at losing 41-39 to the Wallabies, mainly because of yet another poor start that allowed the Wallabies to lead 31-6 in the first half because of a plethora of Bok mistakes on defence.

Smit called on all Springbok players to “look in the mirror and be honest if you’ve brought everything you can” to the Bok cause, showing the real sense of displeasure with the way the Boks had again let things slip.

“Everyone knows here we have players with experience. I told all the players that we have to get up tomorrow and have a good long hard look at ourselves in the mirror and see if we’ve brought everything we have got to the team,” Smit said at the post-match press conference.

“The margins are small but for two weeks in a row now we have had to play catch-up rugby and we don’t want that. We want to be clinical for a full 80 minutes and if we are honest with ourselves we are below par and off the pace.”

Smit said he was unsure of how the start suddenly went all pear shaped again, with the Boks being exposed on Bryan Habana’s wing way too easily.

“It certainly did seem way too easy for them to get through our defence and again we needed to play catch-up rugby. We wanted a good start but we didn’t get a good one.”

Smit said he doesn’t “feel good” after the defeat, and was irritated that the team had let it slip like this in the first half.

“I really didn’t want to have the same team talk in the first half. We wanted to have a good start but we didn’t implement our defensive system properly. While we trained well all week, we made mistakes and we paid the price. We wanted to put in a decent performance but we only have ourselves to blame.

“We came off second best and if we are really honest with ourselves we have a lot of work to do.”