Cape Town - Western Province coach John Dobson says their troubles at lineout time cost them in the Currie Cup final defeat to the Sharks at Newlands over the weekend.
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WP’s lineout completely malfunctioned and the odd occasion they managed to win possession, it was not clean ball and it put them under pressure.
WP won several penalties in the match, but were unable to launch any meaningful attacks as the subsequent lineout platform was absent.
“What is important is to look at facts and not the emotion of it. If you are going to lose eight lineouts, you are making another 40 tackles. It is very hard to defend turnovers, when we are going backwards and they are going forward at such a speed,” a dejected Dobson said at the post-match press conference.
“We have got to look at it properly. I know there was one overthrow, one underthrow, one wrong call, so it seemed to be a combination. We should have gone to a bail-out ball, that is taking it really simple. We kept trying to push it to the middle and back-ball to attack from. We should have been more conservative there.
“The overriding thing is that if we had won six of those lineouts, it could have been a different result. We lost by five points. If we had won those lineouts, it is guaranteed that we would have scored one try.”
Hooker Bongi Mbonambi was substituted by Scarra Ntubeni at half-time, but Dobson said it was not due to the player’s efforts at lineout time.
“Bongi could have pushed on, but he was pretty stuffed at half-time and when I asked whether he could carry on he took a while to answer. Our plan was to give Scarra a longer run anyway.”