Tonight’s New Year Eve’s Vodacom United Rugby Championship clash against the Vodacom Bulls at Hollywoodbets Kings Park promises a spectacle of brutal, physical rugby.
The Vodacom Bulls are not known to shy away from a contest and having lost to the DHL Stormers last week, will arrive in Durban looking to close out their year on a high.
Speaking on the eve of the contest, Cell C Sharks Director of Rugby Neil Powell admitted that much the same could be said about his team, although they are enjoying a rich vein of form and for them, this is another opportunity to build on what they have accomplished over the last month.
“The Bulls are coming to our stadium, our home and we know it’s going to be a big, physical challenge,” he explained.
“We’ve spoken this week about what we need to do to be successful. This is a really good opportunity for us to continue to build momentum and get more cohesion in the team.
We picked up after the Lions game that there were a lot of opportunities missed, so we would definitely like to be a lot more clinical in terms of taking our opportunities because we know that a quality team like the Bulls will give you only so many opportunities and it’s important to capitalise.”
He pointed to game management as a vital part of the clash, explaining that, “It’s important that we manage the game well, we’ve taken steps in the right direction over the last few games with regards to where we play and where we don’t play, and that’s going to be crucial in this game.
“We need to play to the conditions and we know what we need to do to be successful.”
Outlining his expectations of a Bulls team that lost to the Stormers last week, he said, “I think they will bring in something extra after that loss, they’ve targeted these two games [against the Stormers and Cell C Sharks], but losing the first one will definitely have hurt them and they’ll want to rectify that against us.
“They will bring a lot of effort to this game, they’ll bring a lot of physicality and they would like to get at least one win out of the two games they’ve targeted. We are aware of that, and we’ve prepared with that in mind and hopefully we come away with a good result.”
Although concluding the year with five wins in a row and the opportunity to go into the new year with a lot of momentum may seem like a positive goal, Powell admitted that this is secondary to what they want to achieve, and that nothing has been accomplished at this stage of the tournament.
“It’s the middle of the season so we don’t really see it as the end of the year, but we feel that we are moving in the right direction. In saying that, there’s still a lot we can do better and we would like to build on last week’s performance.
“So our goal is to just keep getting better, moving in the right direction and try to finish off the opportunities we make.
“If you can create momentum and build on that flow, it’s really good, but there’s also a big awareness around complacency. We know we can’t just rock up and think everything will go our way.
“We need to really get stuck in and implement our jobs on the field and bring the effort with it.”