Read this preview and you tell me who will win .I cant call it.

Read this preview and you tell me who will win .I cant call it.
MIKE GREENAWAY IN LONDON

The last two matches between the Springboks and England were massively successful occasions for the South Africans, one of them being the Rugby World Cup final in Paris in 2007 and the other a record drubbing for England on the hallowed turf of Twickenham (42-6 in 2008). Those victories were wildly celebrated by the Springbok players and if they win again when they meet their old foe at Twickenham tomorrow the party will be just as raucous given their thoroughly miserable year.
A win also mean a reprieve for Peter de Villiers. It is hotly rumoured that the coach was given an ultimatum of “win at least three matches or else” when he met with his disgruntled Saru bosses at the end of the failed Tri-Nations campaign.
De Villiers promptly tore up the leave forms of the front-line Springboks that he had earlier said would be watching the tour from their deck chairs in sunny South Africa and picked the strongest possible tour squad.
Victories in Dublin and Cardiff, albeit laboured ones, seemed to have De Villiers on course for a career-saving Grand Slam only for the party-pooping Scots to toss a caber in the works.
Now it is all to play for and the Boks are resounding underdogs – on the back of the Scotland defeat and a fine England performance in thumping Australia a fortnight ago, giving them home and away success over the Wallabies this year (they won in Sydney in June).
An England team with four changes struggled to beat Samoa a week later but that has not made a dent on the euphoria in this part of the world and it has been forgotten that in the Six Nations England lost at home to Ireland, drew with Scotland and struggled to subdue Italy (they won by five points). But suddenly England are world beaters again in the eyes of their fans and media and the team to watch in New Zealand next year.
The bottom line, though, back at England’s RFU is that Johnson is under almost as much pressure as De Villiers. Like the Springbok coach he has won two and lost one during this Autumn series (England lost to the All Blacks). Tomorrow’s match is the last one and the winner will go up to a face-saving 75 percent record, the year will end on a high and there will be positive start to the World Cup year.
For the loser, 50 percent is as good as failing.
England expect to beat the Boks, and the Boks should expect to beat England but probably don’t because of the gradual erosion of confidence and belief this year. Five defeats in Six Tri-Nations games would have anybody looking worriedly in the mirror and a loss for a Tri-Nations team to Scotland is morale-breaking.
The encouraging thing for the Springboks is that they still have five members of the pack that dominated a strong England pack in the 42-6 win. They also have Morne Steyn’s unerring boot and you can rest assured that the game plan will be as simple and conservative as it has ever been – play in the opposition half and the forwards win penalties for Steyn to goal. As Dick Muir said yesterday, “this is not about performance, it is about the result.”
Spoken like a coach that knows his job on the line in the freezing cold of Twickenham tomorrow….

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

Up ↑

%d bloggers like this: