Watch every second of the 2025 Autumn Nations Series live and on demand via Stan Sport.<\/a><\/p>\nTries from Marco van Staden, Morne van Den Berg, Grant Williams and Ethan Hooker earned South Africa a comfortable win in the end after they withstood enormous early pressure from Italy, who found one second-half try through Ange Capuozzo.<\/p>\n
Italy came in buoyed up by last week’s fightback to record their second-ever win over Australia and they sensed a chance to do the same against the No.1 ranked side in the world after the Springboks made 11 changes to the side which beat France 32-17 a week ago.<\/p>\n
Those chances took a huge boost when early Italian pressure had South Africa on the backfoot and the Boks lost Mostert to a straight red card for dangerous play but the visitors, who played the second half with 14 men against France, showed enormous resilience once again.<\/p>\n
Garbisi, who had a 100 per cent kick rate against Australia, missed the resulting penalty and pulled another wide as Italy failed to get their noses in front.<\/p>\n
A rare foray into the Italian 22-metre area led to Handre Pollard converting a penalty before Garbisi finally got off the mark to level but Van Staden drove over for a try on the stroke of halftime and, with Pollard’s conversion, South Africa went in 10-3 up.<\/p>\n
Garbisi put over two penalties after the break to make it a one-point match, before another Pollard penalty and Van Den Berg’s try put South Africa back in the driving seat.<\/p>\n
Capuozzo darted in to find Italy’s only try and briefly keep them in touch, although Garbisi failed to convert. Italy’s spirit was finally broken with tries in the last 10 minutes from Williams and Hooker.<\/p>\n
Italy are left with plenty of regrets after failing to make their pressure count and often resorting to ineffective grubber kicks when close to the Springboks’ line and in the end South Africa’s strength proved too much for Gonzalo Quesada’s side.<\/p>\n
South Africa beat France 32-17 a week ago, playing with 14 men for all of the second half, while Italy came from behind to defeat Australia last time out.<\/p>\n
But there was no second-ever win over the Springboks for the home side despite an impressive first-half performance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"South Africa shrugged off a red card for the second successive match to power to a 32-14 win…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":286752,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,2328,760,85,2995],"class_list":["post-286751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-italy","tag-rugby","tag-sports","tag-springboks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/286752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}