When the Southern Kings made history for being the first newly added team to win their opening game in the Super Rugby Competition in beating the Western Force by 22 - 10, it was said that the Sharks would be their first real test.
The Kings made it difficult for last years losing finalists and were still looking good to get a losing bonus point for their troubles, but a Patrick Lambie penalty in the last 10 minutes took that away from them, final score 12 - 22.
It did not get any easier as they played the 2012 champions the Chiefs the week after, and most said that this would be their first real test (i thought that was the Sharks) and some suggested a difference of 50+ points. The Chiefs started off running every ball and was surely out to proof a point. The Kings once again proof their critics wrong. The Chiefs did manage to score 4 tries but the Kings were also scoring points at every opportunity, and as in the Sharks game the Chiefs had to kick one final penalty to take it away from the Kings, final score 35 - 24.
This weekend the Kings will face the Crusaders in Christchurch and in my opinion this will be their first real test. Crusaders being the team that played in the most Super Rugby (S12, S14,S15) finals, 10 in total and winning 7 out of 10 is a tremendous achievement in itself. The Crusaders have a good number of All Blacks in their team and they all have BMT.
Crusaders might have lost their first two game of this years competition against the Blues and the Hurricanes. Both of those games were away games but they were not going to disappoint their home crowd when they faced the Bulls last week. They thumped the Bulls in their first home game of the season 41 - 19.
Most of the players in the Kings side have only seem the Crusaders play on TV and for some of them its their first time playing overseas and playing 7 times Super Rugby champions is maybe not the way you would want to remember your first tour game. The Kings are also without some of their own big names, namely Luke Watson, Darron Nell, SP Marais, Steven Sykes, Andries Struass and Michael Killian.
The Kings have showed the rugby public that they are here to play and i think it is only fair to judge them on what we have seen so far in the last 3 game. Their defense were top class against the Force and Sharks only conceding 2 tries against the Force and managed to keep the Sharks tryless for 80 minutes. Things fell apart against the Chiefs last weekend where they lost a bit of concentration at the start of the second half.
The Kings still need to show us what they can offer on attack as we have mainly seen them defend for all they worth, they did however show a bit of attacking play towards the end of the Chiefs game to give them a scare but a little to late to do anything to the score card.
Against the Crusaders the Kings will throw everything at them on defense and might keep them from scoring for the first quarter of the game but as soon as the defensive wall breaks it could get ugly. If the Kings can take confidence from their previous games and back themselves with ball in hand and get into the Crusaders 22, taking the game to them as to defending for 80 minutes the Kings could come within 20 points or less.
Game kicks off at 8:35 SA time.
No comments:
Post a Comment