The Vodacom Bulls registered a resounding 29-54 victory in round three of the 2023/24 Vodacom United Rugby Championship. Vodacom Bulls Director of Rugby Jake White said the win against Zebre Parma will boost their confidence.
Jake White said: “This result will do our confidence a lot of good. Anyone coming here (to Italy) and undermining Zebre do so at their own peril because they asked us a lot of questions,”
“Making a couple of changes probably brought us a lot of new energy. We now need to try and keep continuity to make sure we don’t start from zero next weekend,”
“I am much happier this week with not only the result but the way we played. We allowed them four tries and so we have to figure out how to close that up but generally happy with the way we played and result.”
On the way his team played and worked out the result, he commented: “We created some nice opportunities, also there are a lot of other things we worked on this week that we needed to,”
“We focused on our scrum and our maul, we didn’t want to give them any penalties there and we didn’t so we were happy with that.”
White went on to say: “David Kriel played at 12 for us last season when Harold (Vorster) was injured, he is a versatile player. It is wonderful to see him play well at centre especially because we have the Springboks returning soon,”
“Simphiwe (Matanzima) was also outstanding today, he scrummed well with Akker (van der Merwe) and Wilco (Louw) who are a little more experienced than him, I’m sure all that experience must be nice for him,”
Asked about the integration of the World Cup-winning quartet of Marco van Staden, Canan Moodie, Willie le Roux and Kurt-Lee Arendse, the Vodacom Bulls mentor reflected: “It will be good to have the national players come back because their energy will be infectious as you can imagine.”
