The baiting started early in Durban yesterday hours before kick-off.<\/p>\n
A Welsh runner turned up to take part in the equivalent of a Parkrun event and when his nationality was unveiled, he was greeted with some friendly advice from one of the South African competitors. <\/p>\n
“We are going to smash you tonight\u201d. Or phrasing to that effect. The South Africans were true to their word.<\/p>\n
The Springboks match-day bus pulled up before the game with the squad given a rousing ovation from the home fans who dragged themselves away from their traditional braai’s in the car parks surrounding Kings Park.<\/p>\n
Then a second bus turned up. Off came the non-match day squad including Cheslin Kolbe, Handre Pollard, Eben Etzebeth, Lood de Jager and Evan Roos, among others.<\/p>\n
An example of the gulf between South Africa and Wales as the number one team on the planet hammered the side 11 places below them in the world rankings.<\/p>\n
In 2022, Wales won a Test match in Bloemfontein. Four years on, that was never going to be repeated in this one-sided contest. In truth, it was never a contest.<\/p>\n
The bookmakers gave Tandy’s men a 42-point head start in the handicap before kick-off, proving to be an accurate prediction.<\/p>\n
The tourists showed fight and spirit, but it was only Springboks’ inaccuracy that kept the score down in testing humid conditions.<\/p>\n
At least Wales conceded 30 fewer points and four less tries than the 73-0 loss to South Africa in Cardiff in November 2025.<\/p>\n
But they still failed to score a point for the second successive time in this fixture with the aggregate score standing at 116-0 over the 160 minutes.<\/p>\n
“I feel flatter after that than the 73-0 loss,” former Wales hooker Scott Baldwin told BBC Radio Wales.<\/p>\n
“We had everyone available, bar three players, and South Africa didn’t have as strong a team as they did at the Principality Stadium.<\/p>\n
“There were so many opportunities for South Africa, they weren’t clinical enough to finish them.<\/p>\n
“Several of those Welsh players went to South Africa four years ago and won a Test match. We look like we have gone backwards over the past two games.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The baiting started early in Durban yesterday hours before kick-off. A Welsh runner turned up to take part…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":810546,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-810545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810545","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=810545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/810546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=810545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=810545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=810545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}