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Nucifora blasts breakdown, scrum rulings
By MARC HINTON - RugbyHeaven | Monday, 31 March 2008
Western Force Rugby Supporters Site
Blues coach David Nucifora should have been a happy man after his team used its "get out of jail" card for the second week in a row at Eden Park on Saturday night. Instead he was seething over perceived injustices at the breakdown and scrum.
Despite his team appearing to have more lives than a cat with a death-wish, Nucifora came into the post-match press conference following the Blues' extremely fortuitous 23-21 win over the Bulls and let rip with a fairly thinly veiled attack at match referee James Leckie of Australia.
It was a surprise riposte from Nucifora who must have appreciated the good fortune of his side which got the benefit of the doubt on both its tries and was outrageously lucky not to have seen Nick Evans' late dropped goal answered by one of the Bulls' own in the dying stages.
They were also fortunate Bulls fullback Zane Kirchner got an unlucky bounce when he looked in on a chip-and-chase five minutes from the end.
But in the end Evans' superbly taken "snap" at goal seven minutes from time proved the match-winner, with the Bulls spurning the chance to give Derick Hougaard an answering pot of his own, despite working their way into perfect field position at the end.
Maybe it was the stress of having to sit through a second straight match that went to the wire, but Nucifora had clearly had his cage rattled when he came into face the media afterwards.
Asked, first, about the breakdown rulings where the Bulls were seemingly prepared to concede a succession of short-arm penalties to slow the Blues' ball down, Nucifora let rip on a tactic that all of the South African sides use against his team.
"Pretty frustrating, I've got to say. There's obviously ways teams try to play us, and you have discussions and try to make sure ball is freed up and allowed to be played.
"We need to be better ourselves to make sure that doesn't come into it, as far as winning the collisions better and clearing our ball better. Against these big South African sides where the collision area is quite difficult to win, once that collision is not won it becomes 50-50 ball. Then you're really at the mercy of the whistle and how he views it. And that's not a good place to be."
And then Nucifora let his frustration boil over: "In all honesty I felt the [full] penalties should have come out sooner than they did. The number of short-arm penalties in the 22 got a little out of hand for my liking."
Then in covering off the Blues' only injury out of the match, a corked thigh to tighthead prop John Afoa, Nucifora lamented the rulings that went against his side at scrum time. In pretty strong terms, too.
"We're more concerned with [loosehead prop] Tony Woodcock. He obviously can't scrummage any more," said Nucifora. "Whatever he's done to be penalised the number of times he was, that takes a lot of momentum away from us. We got penalised more times in the scrum tonight than we'd been penalised all year.
"The scrum was disappointing for us in the way it was managed."
For all of the above, Nucifora conceded that his team was its own worst enemy at times against a desperate Bulls side clearly buoyed by the return of wonder wing Bryan Habana (who was magnificent) and classy No 8 Pierre Spies. The defending champions produced one of their better displays of a disappointing season as they looked to keep alive their slim hopes of making the playoffs.
Nucifora said the game was too stop-start in the first half, lurching from set piece to set piece, and this played right into the big South Africans' hands.
"That became a real problem for us. Teams want to get off the line and shut down our space, and they obviously push that to the limit. We should have been smarter and varied our play a bit more and worked harder at trying to keep the continuity of the game up.
"Both times when we scored we let them straight back into it by allowing them to come into our quarter, get lineouts and let them drive at us. As we all know, that's one of their strengths.
"We couldn't afford that to happen. We kept them in the game and kept their tails up. I said during the week they were always going to be a desperate side with a lot of good footballers. It was only a matter of time before they came good."
Nucifora did concede to some satisfaction at having come through on the right side of two extremely tight matches ("The only positive is I haven't had a heart attack yet," he joked of the tension-filled last two matches) and also expressed some amazement that the South Africans hadn't attempted a dropped goal themselves at the end, when eventually they conceded a free-kick after establishing field position handy to the posts.
But he's also far from content about his own side's form which is scratchy at best. Too much dropped ball, too many questionable decisions and then on Saturday night a kicking game that was also off colour.
"We're not happy with the way we're playing at the moment," said the Blues coach. "We need to be playing better football. I suppose the positive for us is we're not playing anywhere near our peak and we're still managing to win games.
"We're going through a patch at the moment where we're not near our peak but we've managed to win the last fortnight. We know we've got to step it up and improve over coming weeks."
That starts with Saturday's visit to Sydney to take on the NSW Waratahs. The Blues lie third on the standings and are handily enough placed. But they know too well it's time to stop riding their luck, and start riding some momentum.
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