Publications
Partners
Cape Town - It's been a tough start to the Bulls in Super Rugby 2017 and Saturday's 38-14 loss to the Blues in Albany means that they have lost three of their four matches this season.
Having tackled hard for the first 40 minutes, they men from Pretoria found themselves well in the game at 7-7 at half-time, but the wheels came off in the second half as the Blues ran in five further tries.
It was a performance that saw the Bulls miss numerous tackles, and now coach Nollis Marais has been forced to think long and hard about his side's defence.
"Yes, obviously, if you concede so many tries in the second half in every match then the defence is definitely a concern and something we will need to revisit and have a look at," he said.
"We were very competitive for the first half. We didn't take our chances in the second half that we were supposed to and gave the Blues too many opportunities to score."
Marais did manage to find one positive.
"We had a great scrum. It was an excellent scrumming performance by Trevor (Nyakane) and we were dominant, so that is a very big positive," he said.
"But there were too many errors. We couldn't convert from our lineouts and we had too many handling errors.
"That gave them a lot of opportunities to play from. We had a couple of opportunities in the second half to play from which we didn't convert to points."
The Bulls are next in action when they take on the Chiefs in Hamilton this weekend.
Kick-off on Saturday is at 08:35 (SA time).
