Foster’s blunt review of Boks bashing

On the back of their worst loss in Test history, Ian Foster has conceded some of his “worst fears” did play out this morning as his team were dished out a World Cup wake-up call or as the blunt All Blacks coach described it, an “uppercut”.

Much of the the talk this week heading into the clash with the Springboks, especially after Foster named a near full-strength side for the exhibition, was whether he was concerned about losing players for the World Cup during the match.

While the answer was a clear “no” prior, seeing Tyrel Lomax leave the match early injured and Scott Barrett handed a red card late in the first half did leave Foster admitting some of the worst possible outcomes came to fruition in the 35-7 loss.

“We were getting constant questions all week about how we felt about the game but it’s a contact game and it is what it is,” Foster said.

“But clearly it was one of those games where there were massive disruptions and while we were hanging in there, we didn’t really get a chance to put them under pressure and then all of sudden we ended up losing Scott and playing them with 13 players.

“We just couldn’t keep 15 on the park and they’re not a good team to do that with.”

Foster played down the expectant judicial process Barrett will have to go through now saying he doesn’t expect to lose one of his key players for much of, if any of the World Cup.

Barrett was handed a yellow card early in the match as a result of too many penalties by the All Blacks in their own half and after he returned to the field, a second yellow card was soon issued once the TMO brought to attention head contact he’d made with Springboks hooker Malcolm Marx while attempting a cleanout at a ruck.

Importantly, that second offence was given as a yellow and remained that way after a referral to the “bunker” but with two yellows to his name, it became a red and his night was over.

“It looked like he was cleaning the guy out on the left and hit the guy on the right,” Foster said of Barrett’s second incident.

“We’ll have to see what comes out of that but we’ll just go through the process.

“But am I expecting to [lose Barrett for World Cup games]? No but we’ll see how we deal with that.”

The outlook wasn’t as positive for Lomax though, who Foster said had suffered a “big cut right through into the muscle” from a boot in a similar fashion to the serious cut Beauden Barrett near his Achilles in Super Rugby earlier this year.

“Tyrel’s pretty bad, actually,” he said.

“We’ve got a little bit of a concern with some of the sharp plastic blade stuff that’s happening at the moment – we’ll have to see which boot that came from and while it certainly wasn’t deliberate, Beauden got cut by the same sort of thing so we’ll have to check that out.

“But he’s not in a good way.”

Foster added he “doubted” Lomax was out of the World Cup but it still added to a night of significant pain for the All Blacks who now have two weeks to right themselves before taking on hosts France in their first match of this year’s Rugby World Cup.

There were some glaring issues to address, Foster said.

“Rugby is quite a simple game – you’ve got to get your platforms right and we didn’t,” he said.

“And that’s in attack and defence. I think on defence we were a bit over-anxious and overly keen. We got warned for going early on lineout mauls all the time and while we’ll have another look at that, clearly we were too keen and anxious.

“And then in the second half when we made all those changes, it was a young pack and you could see them trying hard but we lost our cohesion.

“But I’d rather have those lessons today than in a fortnight.”

Make no mistake though, Foster isn’t taking the All Blacks’ biggest losing margin in their history lightly.

“We certainly got an uppercut today and we got an uppercut in a couple of areas of the game that we’ve been making some big strides – our lineouts and scrums, our discipline.

“We’ve been good in those spaces but we got squeezed today and exposed to a couple of habits that we’ve got to sort out but it’s a great time for that to happen.”