Still smarting from their shock defeat to a spirited Australia at Ellis Park on Saturday, Springbok prop Ox Nché admitted they may have to win all their remaining matches to lift the Rugby Championship trophy.
After the Boks lost 38-22 to the Wallabies, tournament favourites New Zealand powered to a convincing 41-24 win over Argentina in Córdoba to return to the top of the world rankings.
The Boks and Wallabies will do it again in Cape Town on Saturday and SA must produce a winning performance because another defeat will leave them on the back foot in the Rugby Championship.
“Yes, every game is a must win now if we want to be in a good place to win the Rugby Championship. We have to win every game from now on,” said Nche.
After Cape Town, the Boks travel to New Zealand for back-to-back Tests and they take on Argentina later and coach Rassie Erasmus, who was not happy with the performance, will know it's not going to be easy.
“Yeah, we were our own worst enemies. In the first half, we played like we planned but we tried too many different things in the second half,” said Nché, adding that they went off script in the second half where they failed to register a single point while Australia added 33 including three tries.
“We didn’t execute our plans, the main problem was that we didn’t get our processes right. Even when we win, we are still hard on ourselves, but the fact is we didn’t tick our boxes.
“We ticked them in the first half but in the second half we absolutely went off script. We just didn’t stick to our game plan. The breakdown is something that we worked on but we just didn’t execute.”
With the second match in Cape Town on Saturday, Nché said they must minimise mistakes and get their campaign back on track.
“You start over and execute better than you did this week. I don’t think we played horribly.
“It is about trusting each other, the game plan and putting a lot more focus into our preparations. We didn’t have a lot of set pieces and we knew they were going to put a lot of pressure on the line-outs. We knew they were going to come with tricks in the scrum.
“We needed to play well and be a lot more prepared. We had to execute everything a little better because we had all the details going into the match.”
Nché said there were mistakes and they know what to focus on to correct them.
“We felt good, conditioning is up there but we just made too many errors. You look at their tries, one was an interception. We kick and there was a scrap, the player runs through a hole in the midfield.
“It was our mistakes because we failed to execute properly and according to our system. The chat at halftime was to stick to the game plan and keep executing it because it was working but we went off script in the second half.
“They scored easy tries, it wasn’t that they were from a good set piece or something like that. It was literally them being more active and ready, we just kept on trying.
“It requires more hard work, preparation and doing more of what we did last week. Making sure we are ready for anything that comes our way.
“We have played against them and we know how it felt. The only thing we can do is execute everything better. I wouldn’t say it was much of a wake-up call because we expected every thing they did.
“But we were just not ready and they were more prepared than us. They passed on every opportunity they got and we didn’t use all our opportunities. Everyone started going off plan instead of sticking to what we had as a team and executing it.”
