A dejected Springbok team were left feeling “sh*t” and down in the dumps after they slumped to a shock defeat against the Wallabies after a poor performance in a chaotic clash in Perth on Sunday, coach Rassie Erasmus said.
The one-off Test against the Wallabies was the Boks’ 10th outing of a demanding season which started with a non-Test outing against the Barbarians in Gqeberha on June 20.
The only loss, before Sunday’s setback, was a 33-16 defeat to the All Blacks in the opening game of the Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry series in Johannesburg.
The Boks will now enjoy a break before resuming their Nations Cup campaign with a match against Italy on November 7 at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome.
“It has been a long slog this season,” Erasmus said.
“But if we won this game at the end against Australia, we would have said, ‘Hey boys, it’s wonderful. We’re together, we enjoy it, we’re a tight team’.
“We enjoy each other’s company and, it’s sh*t to lose games. We don’t enjoy it.
“We know our South Africans, where they are now, and we know how they feel now, and we don’t want to give them that feeling.
“So no, it’s not because we’ve been too long together.
“It’s because we didn’t play well.
“Australia are a good team and they’ve definitely improved a lot.
“They played at home and they’re the World Cup hosts next year.
“We might meet them in a vital playoff game, and it was nice to get a taste of them tonight.
“When we play them next year, we’ll know a little bit more about each other.
“I’m not going to say it was a case of lessons learnt, but it was a valuable experience.
“For the neutral, it must have been a really exciting game to watch, and for Australia it must be awesome.
“For us, we lost in a Springbok jersey, and against Australia.”
A forthright Erasmus said the blame for the loss lay squarely on the Boks’ shoulders.
“With all the disruptions and things that there were [during the game], we’ve got nobody else to blame but ourselves because of the result,” he said.
“I know the technology failed a bit and there were lots of clocks that kept on running sometimes and didn’t stop, but that didn’t influence how we played.
“We controlled how we played, and we didn’t play well enough today to beat Australia.
“It’s tough when there are reviews, and the clock keeps going, and then you lose 20 seconds, and there’s another review, and you lose another five seconds.
“But we played ourselves into that position where we were 25 points behind, so we’ve got nobody else to blame. It’s us.
“We rolled the dice a little bit [with the team], and some guys hadn’t played a lot together in a long time.
“Not as an excuse. We picked the team, and we had a game plan, and our game plan and our players and our coaching staff didn’t trump them at the end.
“I thought we had a chance at the end there.”
Erasmus praised the officials for the manner in which they handled the technical breakdown of their communications, which saw them using mobile phones to communicate.
“The way the referees handled the game without comms was outstanding,” he said.
“I know it looked chaotic, but I thought they got a lot of things right by being on the telephone.”
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