Springboks will fight back in second Test

SA will come back fighting strongly when they face the British & Irish Lions in Saturday’s do-or-die second Test, Bok prop Steven Kitshoff warned.

In Saturday’s opening Test, the World Champion Boks were stunned when the Lions managed to claw back a 12-3 half-time deficit to run out 2217 winners.

The wounded Boks have been backed into a corner and must win the second Test at the Cape Town Stadium to keep the three-match series alive.

“South Africans, as a country and people, know how to fight back and stand up stronger,” the prop said.

“This will be a big week for us and there will be a lot of work put into our set piece and kicking game and the way we approach the second game.

“So we have to come up with solutions quickly.

“They always say seven days in your lifetime is short, but in rugby terms it is a long time.

“So there is time to fix things that we can take control of as a pack of forwards.

“The team had a hard look at the game with the Bok management. Looking back at the game, the Lions did well to take away some of SA’S strong points. There are a lot of work-ons for us this week that we will try to iron out.

“In the first half, we were tactically and technical very good and got our scrum going and got a lot penalties.

“In the second half, I’m not 100% sure what went wrong, but we could not go forward on the scrum and our line-outs got disrupted

“The Lions also put a lot of kicking pressure onto us.

“That is something that we as individual players will look at.

“We all take a lot of pride in the scrum and we were not able to go forward and put our team on the front foot.

“We know what we will have to work on this week to put the team in a better position.

Kitshoff said the Cape Town field, which cut up, had made life difficult for the players.

“The field does cut up a lot and it is difficult to set your feet or plant them and there is some pressure coming.

“This field does give way and becomes very slippery, so there are things we want to work on in the way we want to scrum that prevents that slipping,” he said.

“One of the biggest work-ons this week is around the lineouts and set piece.

“We sat on Monday with assistant coach Deon Davids and discussed the areas where we slipped up a couple of times and made big errors that did not help the team at all.”