No 'fear' in Bok camp as injuries rock rugby world
SPOTLIGHT: There is always the risk of picking up injuries in World Cup warm-up matches and this past weekend’s clashes proved that anything could happen from now until the big event in France.
On Monday, the hosts were rocked by the news that star flyhalf Romain Ntamack was ruled out of the event due to a knee injury.
Not long after that, the nation learnt that prop Cyril Baille could also miss his team’s whole campaign with a calf problem. Both Ntamack and Baille suffered those injuries in a warm-up match against Scotland in Saint-Etienne.
Also on Monday, England got the news that scrumhalf Jack van Poortvliet will play no part in this year’s tournament after suffering an ankle injury against Wales.
Meanwhile, Scotland will also be waiting for news on Duhan van der Merwe who went off injured in that match against France.
Ahead of his team’s warm-up match against Wales in Cardiff on Saturday, Springbok scrum coach Daan Human says fear of injury should not dominate the squad’s psyche due to their strength in numbers.
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“There are a lot of injuries happening at the moment.
“The French team just lost Ntamack, who is their first-choice flyhalf, so it [injuries] does happen and obviously to us as well.
“We got one or two guys on the fringe coming back from injury, who are not in the group at the moment. We are still tracking them.
“That will have an influence, but unfortunately these are games that should be played in preparation for the World Cup.
“I don’t think we should have a lot of fear going into these games because we have got a good group.
“We have got a lot of players that can still come in.
“Unfortunately, it [injuries] are part of the game.”
‘Scrum dominance’
Meanwhile, Human would like to see his team get more rewards from the scrummaging department.
The Boks have some world-class props and hookers and Human wants more set-pieces to assert their dominance.
“We have tried a lot of combinations because we wanted to be fair to all the players, by giving every guy a chance to make it into the group,” Human explained.
“I think we played around with a couple of combinations, but maybe going forward, we will settle down.
“In some games, we are feeling very frustrated because there isn’t a lot of scrums, so you don’t have such a big influence as we would like to have in the game.
“We always want to get the reward. It’s not always going our way, but we will see how it goes.”
