With the Springboks set to visit Twickenham on Saturday, Tendai ‘Beast’ Mtawarira has spoken about how he dismantled the England scrum in the 2019 World Cup final when the teams last met.
The Springboks will take on Eddie Jones’ England at Twickenham on Saturday, in a repeat of the 2019 World Cup final in Yokohama.
In that match, which turned out to be his last for the Springboks, Mtawarira demolished the England scrum, giving Dan Cole a torrid time at the set piece.
Mtawarira was originally set to be up against Kyle Sinckler in the scrums, but the England tighthead was forced off early in the first half due to a concussion.
“England were scrummaging really well, but when you look at our games in the pool stages leading into that final we made sure we tried to get as many penalties up front despite how good the other pack was,” Mtawarira told Telegraph Sport.
“I was preparing for Kyle Sinckler. I could see his bind was not the strongest. I could see that he liked to pre-engage a lot, so I did a lot of work on countering that and making sure I did not give him what he wanted. Frans Malherbe, on the other side, was looking at Mako [Vunipola] and saw he had a weak bind. We identified certain aspects of the English scrum that we wanted to exploit.”
Going through his performance scrum by scrum, Mtawarira said that he knew he could get the upper hand on Cole.
“When Dan came on, I knew he was not fully match fit. I just thought to myself ,’I am going to go for him at every single scrum’.
“When Dan scrummages on his own terms he is unbelievable. But when you put him under pressure, he tries to take the scrum down and I never allowed him to do that.
“I just cranked on the pressure because of my bind. My coach used to call my left arm the titanium arm because I would not let my opponent go down. My bind was a huge part of my success.”
Photo: Craig Mercer/MB Media/Getty Images
