All Blacks boss Dave Rennie admits they will “do a lot of work” on their discipline after they were on the wrong side of the referee’s whistle in their victory over the Stormers.
Although they began their South African tour with a 38-21 victory over the Cape Town outfit, New Zealand infringed on plenty of occasions, receiving three yellow cards in the process.
Anton Lienert-Brown, Simon Parker and Josh Moorby were all sin-binned to leave Rennie with plenty to think about heading into their next game against the Sharks.
At one stage they were down to 13 men but the positive for the All Blacks boss was that they got through that period without taking any damage on the scoreboard.
The ‘pleasing part’ for Dave Rennie
“You don’t want to give away penalties. If you look at the first cards, it was scrum penalty, maul penalty, maul penalty, throwing across in the lineout, a couple of advantages in there and then a head contact,” Rennie said.
“It looked pretty minor but that’s our game nowadays, so we lose someone to the bin and then we get penalised for another indiscretion at a maul.
“We will do a lot of work. We know other teams will want to come there and we will have to do a better job on stopping momentum initially, so not allowing them to piggy back.
“I thought we barred up through that period when we had 13 so that was the pleasing part.”
Rennie has constantly preached quick ball, which was particularly in evidence in their wins over France and Ireland last month.
They were not quite as convincing in Cape Town, however, with the Stormers defending well for large parts and preventing the All Blacks from finding their fluency with ball in hand.
The match did eventually open up for the visitors as their greater fitness and quality told.
Fierce breakdown contest
“Both sides were pretty competitive post-tackle and what we know is we will have sides who will try and slow our ball down, so we played a fair bit of footy under penalty advantage,” Rennie added.
“I thought we carried and cleaned well. What we knew was we had to be accurate and if we could be accurate and go multi-phase then we would find space. If you don’t, you give them a chance to slow the game down and go back to a set-piece.
“The slippery ball was challenging at times but you’ve got to give credit to the Stormers line speed. We had numbers at times and they were able to get up in the channel and force an error or force us back inside.
“We expect that from every team we play over here.”