An Assessment of Disappointment:
Cell C Sharks Director of Rugby Gary Gold said after the match that there was no getting away from a performance that failed to ignite to levels necessary to beat a team like the Lions.
A good team doesn’t need any prompting when they have opportunities sent their way, and Gold said that the Lions are too good a side not to accept anything that comes their way.
“It was a very tough night, a very poor first half performance by us, but I also think that credit must go to the Lions,” he said after the match. “They took their opportunities, they fed off our mistakes – particularly a couple of critical errors – and the quality team that they are, they took advantage of that.”
A general overview from Gold revealed that as their own particular downfall. “I think our error rate, we knew what we wanted to do but we didn’t execute well enough, silly errors that allowed them to capitalise and score and with a team like the Lions with confidence as high as it is and playing as well as they are, when you make those mistakes, they’re going to hurt you.”
It was a much better second half performance from his team where they and the Lions scored 10 points apiece, but by then, the damage had been done.
“To turn at half-time 27-nil down was always going to be a challenge. Our game management improved in the second half but it wasn’t good enough in the first half. It was execution and possibly being not ruthless enough in sticking to our game plan for the first 40 minutes.
“We needed to come here and perform better than we did and get the result; we didn’t do that.”
Eight teams will go through to the qualifiers with the Cell C Sharks currently one of those teams despite the disappointing result against the Lions. But this means that they have a big task on their hands in the final fortnight of the pool stages.
“The last two weeks are going to be difficult,” said Gold. “The Cheetahs are coming off a good win having played some good rugby this season.”
He confirmed that Paul Jordaan took a bad knock to the knee early in the match and may have done himself some damage to a knee ligament. “That didn’t make life easy after losing Andre and Paul, our centre combination for the whole season, but that’s unfortunate and certainly no excuse.”
On the possibility of Pat Lambie returning to action next week, Gold said “I hope so. We were hoping that he would have been ready for this week, but up until Wednesday, he wasn’t showing any signs of improving and we need to look after our players.”
For Gold, the way forward is to “Cut out the silly little errors we made and we need to be a little bit more ruthless on ourselves in terms of the quality of our execution of the game plan. If we get that right, we must just build on the confidence from the games we’ve played well in this season.
“We’re still in the running and we need to show some character and come back fighting.”
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