Coach Snyman has harsh words with Blitzboks, says must play as 'collective'

The Olympic flame has yet to be lit, but the Blitzboks’ hopes of a medal were all but extinguished as they lost their opening two matches of Paris 2024 on Wednesday.

They went down 5-10 to Ireland in their opener and 5-17 to New Zealand in the final match of the evening, but they can still get to the quarterfinals as one of the two best third-placed teams across the three pools.

They will need to beat Japan on Thursday afternoon and there’s a possibility they could end up facing the winner of New Zealand and Ireland in the quarterfinal.

Whoever they take on, they’re going to have to pull up their socks considerably. 

The team, which has been mostly poor the whole season, is going to need a spectacular turnaround by the time they take on Japan at 4pm on Thursday. The quarterfinals kick off at 9pm, with Argentina, Ireland, New Zealand and Fiji producing performances to suggest they are among the favourites. 

There had been hopes that the Blitzboks could emulate the Springboks, losing to Ireland on their way to a tournament victory, but whatever magic Siya Kolisi and his men had enjoyed at Stade de France last year had long evaporated by Wednesday. 

The players trudged through the mixed zone looking down after the second defeat, but coach Philip Snyman said some harsh words had been handed down on the field in the immediate aftermath. “You need to call a spade a spade,” he said. 

He didn’t hold back in his comments to the media either. 

“I think the first game against Ireland, we only had 15% ball possession and you can’t play the game like that and to only lose 10-5, I think the guys defended well ...

“We only kept the ball once for more than three phases and we scored.

“The second game against New Zealand, the guys defended well at stages and once we got the ball we couldn’t put up phases, we made schoolboy errors. We looked like we didn’t want to have the ball, it looked like we didn’t want to attack,” said Snyman, a former player who won bronze at Rio 2016.

“We need to dig deep and we need to look hard at ourselves and get ourselves in a good mental space for tomorrow and make sure we rock up,” said Snyman.

“We can still make it to the quarterfinals, but it’s all up to us. We need to come out with the right mentality and play together as a collective and show what this team can do.”

Snyman said they would have a deeper assessment overnight. “We need to get back onto the horse, get back to zero as quickly as possible after a good win or a bad loss.

“We will have a good review tonight and then again some words and then after that we need to put it behind us and then only one game in front of us and only focus on the next job ...

“If we play the way that we can this team can be a good team. There’s a good bunch of players there, we just need to fire as a collective.”