The Blitzboks could only win one of their five fixtures at the HSBC World Sevens Series in Los Angeles. They lost both their fixtures, to Fiji (28-7) in the quarter-finals and Samoa (45-5) in the fifth-place semi-final, in a performance described by Springbok Sevens coach Sandile Ngcobo as unacceptable and completely devoid of effort.
To add to their woes, the Blitzboks suffered yet another spate of injuries during the tournament, limping off the Los Angeles pitch with only nine players fit to play.
Ngcobo did not mince his words about the performances on Sunday: “It was almost heartbreaking for me to watch from the side-lines as there was no effort at all from the players, and that hurts as the badge that we play for does not deserve that, neither do our supporters or our country.
“It seemed that complacency crept in and that the guys were just going through the motions expecting things to happen, instead of going there and making it happen.
“A performance like this is disrespectful to our badge and to our country and we will have to have an extremely hard look at ourselves,” added Ngcobo, who said he will also do some introspection.
“I will have to ask myself why and how we delivered such a poor performance and how can we fix that,” he said. “Yes, we did play in the final in the previous tournament in Sydney, but that counted for nothing, we had to start at zero again, but we never did.”
Ngcobo said there was no fight in his squad and that was most disappointing, especially against Samoa.
“In that last game against Samoa, they kept giving us possession (from restarts) and we kept giving it away and missing tackles,” said Ngcobo.
“That was just a lack of effort and disrespect. The game for me is 20 percent physical and 80 percent mental and we just did not pitch mentally. The system deserves better, and we will have to regroup with Vancouver (HSBC Canada Sevens) only five days away.”