South African sides can expect a far tougher challenge from the overseas sides in the Vodacom United Rugby Championship with the return of their star players from Six Nations duty.
So says Vodacom Bulls forwards coach Russell Winter, whose side will host the Dragons at Loftus Versfeld on Saturday. An overseas team has yet to win a URC match in the Republic but Winter believes the locals can ill-afford to become complacent.
“It won’t get any easier now with the Six Nations being over, their internationals will be back, so it won’t be easy to turn over the travelling sides,” the assistant coach said. “If you lose four or five international players and you want to continue with the momentum you’ve built, that can be difficult.
“When those players come back, there’s going to be a definite change within the urgency because they all have great players and at times, teams go through these phases. They’ll bounce back when they get their international players back because the teams are far better than the results they displayed.”
The Bulls smashed Scarlets 55-7 on Friday, a week removed from edging Munster 29-24, yet Winter isn’t reading too much into those performances.
“We didn’t expect the scores to be what they were and we’re genuinely aware that they have internationals out,” he said. “We knew that this was going to be our chance to play really well and put pressure on the travelling sides as the time did allow, but we didn’t expect the high scores.
“Playing at altitude and in the heat was always going to be a struggle for European teams, so we wanted to take advantage of that.”
Winter added: “Because we’ve played abroad at and home, we’re getting to understand the tournament a little bit better, especially how their overseas-based players play.
“This entire season is going to be a learning phase because we didn’t have a pre-season to work on certain aspects of our game that would hurt the European sides. We had a lot of local games and we got into the competition quite late. We’ve found a way to play in this competition and we need to build on it.”
