Sharks scrum concerns says Strudwick
Cell C Sharks assistant coach, Ryan Strudwick, has today admitted that they are not happy with their scrum.
Strudwick discussed the following topics in the wake of the loss to Western Province over the past weekend:
General thoughts
Our set-piece is improving but we are concerned with the scrumming. It's costing us a lot of penalties and it's really hurting us.
We are working with the youngsters and we are trying to develop them; we need to keep persevering.
Focus points this week
Scrums will definitely be a major focus point, especially knowing what the Lions bring to the party with probably the best scrum in the country at the moment. They will target the scrums and try to expose us there, they won't necessarily look to get clean ball from scrums, but penalties which will be a concern for us.
Line-outs
We keep working on that area of the game and although it wasn't the best, it was better than the week before and it's a work in progress. Our hookers need to make sure of their throwing.
Lions challenge
It's a massive challenge for us, especially up there. We feel we can take them - we feel that with every team - because we can't go into games thinking we're going to lose. We targeted these three games [Province, Lions and Bulls] to win all three. We've stumbled on the first one so we will go into this game with a positive outlook and we're going up to Johannesburg to try and win. They have a really balanced team and have been working together for a while, they are improving every week and getting better and better and they're proving that week in and week out. We feel we had a bit of a chance against them when we played them in the first round in Durban, it could have gone either way but for them to score two broken play tries in the end. We are confident, we aren't going up there with a negative attitude - we will go there all guns blazing and hopefully get the result we need.
Log congestion
Fortunately other results went our way this weekend with Free State and the Pumas both losing. We realise there will be a huge tussle right to the end and quite possibly the final match of the pool stages against Free State could take on significant importance.
But we'll take it one step at a time, and that means all our focus is on the Lions this weekend.
Kickoff in Johannesburg is at 14h30 on Saturday afternoon.
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Photo by Andre Bloem