Emirates Lions head coach Ivan van Rooyen downplayed their loss to the Ospreys and its potential impact to their confidence levels ahead of their United Rugby Championship encounter against the Bulls in Pretoria on Saturday at 15:00 (SA Time).
“To be honest, it’s not a wake-up call before the Bulls game because I’ve got no doubt that we will be ready for it,” van Rooyen said.
“If you want to call it a wake-up call, then you can’t expect to just go through the emotions."
“It is a high-performance sport, so every team that you play against will want to beat you."
“We must understand that an iconic stadium, Emirates Airline Park, is going to lift your opponents’ performance, so I would rather say it’s a wake-up call for us to get our systems going and more consistently.”
Emirates Lions captain Marius Louw, however, was disappointed with Sunday’s loss to Ospreys. Louw cited inconsistency as a key issue in their performance.
“Our defence in the beginning is what helped us. We got turnovers and we got to play in their half,” Louw said.
“For me, it was not having consecutive positives. There was a positive, then a negative and then a positive and then two negatives, which led to them scoring."
“We just need to be a little more consistent in getting positives in a row.”
“From my side on the field, it felt like there was dominance, we got gainline (dominance) and we had them in the set-piece, so it was little things towards the end that were not good enough.
Louw said the defence of the Emirates Lions was particularly disappointing.
“We let them in with our discipline and then in the last seven minutes it was our defence,” he said.
“It was not good enough. We didn’t get off the line.
“We started to wait for them and they ran onto us. They got in behind us, they got offloads and I don’t think those are our character.