Durban - By his own admission, Frans Steyn is no historian and he is no doubt unaware that over the course of his 74-Test career he has lost more times to Australia than he has won, and in fact has enjoyed more wins over the All Blacks than the Wallabies.
This probably goes for most of the 32 Springboks who are in Adelaide preparing for Saturday’s Rugby Championship match and neither Steyn nor Lood de Jager — the two were on press conference duty — can put their finger on why the Boks just don’t switch on for a team they should beat nine times out of 10, anytime anywhere.
“I don’t think it is a mental thing,” said Steyn, who over the 15 years of his career has played the Wallabies 11 times and lost on six occasions. “Even in my Super Rugby days (with the Sharks), we struggled more in Australia than we did in New Zealand.
“I don’t know why, it just seems to happen, but thankfully we now have an opportunity to do something about it and hopefully all of us are switched on and (are) ready to do something special on Saturday.
“Last year, we lost twice to Australia (in Queensland) when I was injured but I then came back the following week and we did well against New Zealand (narrowly losing a game and winning the other), so hopefully me coming back now after injury will bring us some luck.”
De Jager said he was puzzled about the Boks’ lack of success in Australia.
“It is a strange one,” De Jager said. “It is not necessarily that we underestimate them or treat them any differently than New Zealand ... I just think maybe it is their style of play over the years that we struggle to get to grips with.
“But whatever it may be, we now have an opportunity to change things and instead of looking back in history we must look forward to Saturday and doing something special ... something that not a lot of Bok teams have done in Australia. So we are looking forward to that.”
De Jager is the lineout kingpin for the Boks and while their lineout was imperious in the series against Wales and in Mbombela against the All Blacks, it creaked and groaned at Ellis Park.
It goes without saying that De Jager has been back at the drawing board, pondering what went wrong.
“Firstly, credit must be given to the All Blacks — they came with a good plan to disrupt our throw and it worked. We need to be better with our plan B for when things go wrong,” De Jager said.
“There was a combination of things that went wrong, not one specific reason and we have looked at it as a pack and hopefully we will be more versatile and produce a much better performance.”
De Jager added that the Bok preparations for this week’s match are a far cry from the ordeal the team went through last year, when they had to spend two weeks in strict isolation on arrival in Australia.
“Last year we had a tough quarantine period and it is good to be back to normal here in Australia in such a lovely city. And there are a lot of South African people here to support us ... We had a great welcome at the airport and hopefully, we can respond with a winning performance,” De Jager said.
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