Blitzboks need ‘everyone to fire at same time’ in LA World Championship

The Blitzboks have done the maths, and coach Philip Snyman knows just what it will take to lift the HSBC SVNS World Championship title at Dignity Health Sports Park in Los Angeles this weekend.

The grand finale, featuring the top eight teams from the SVNS Series regular season, will be a season-defining moment, Snyman admitted.

South Africa will face Olympic champions France, Great Britain and league winners Argentina on Saturday in Pool A of the tournament.

Fiji, Spain, Australia and New Zealand are in Pool B and the top two teams in each pool will contest Sunday’s semi-finals.

“It doesn’t matter what happened previously – if we’ve beaten Argentina – this weekend will be a once-off tournament. So every game, from the first game against France, we need to be our utmost best,” Snyman said on the eve of the last tournament of the year.

“We need to go out firing and we need everyone to have an above-average tournament, like an eight out of 10, at least, and then we have the guys that can bring that magic moment to up the average of the team.

“So we need to be consistent, and we need everyone to be firing at the same time to give us a chance.

“And if we can do that this weekend, we’ll give ourselves a chance to be successful.”

The Blitzboks coach also stressed the need to be clinical, focused in their execution, and to put the rest of the season behind them.

South Africa’s only victory this season was in the home tournament in Cape Town.

“We can look back at the regular series where we had a mixed bag of results, but this effort here in Los Angeles will define the season,” said Snyman.

“There were brilliant moments, average moments and some poor moments, but we are looking towards this weekend, not behind us.

“We had our review of the series and know what we were good at, or not.

"Our fourth place in the series was an improvement from the previous year, but we want to be remembered by more than that.”

The Blitzboks mentor feels, however, that there are positives to be taken out of the campaign.

“We’ve been really hard on ourselves and it’s going to take a massive team effort. We’re going to need to be at our best – it’s the top eight playing in the grand finale – and we need to be clinical in every single game, and especially to go out firing from the start," he said.

“We can’t play one half of sevens... we need to be consistent throughout the weekend.

“And that’s basically the theme of our week, and the theme of this tournament is to be consistent and to be clinical.”

Snyman said their preparations went well, and he was pleased with the trio of Ronald Brown, Mfundo Ndhlovu and Quewin Nortjé, who joined the squad for this trip.

“We needed some new energy, given the short turnaround from Singapore, where we did not deliver,” said the Blitzboks coach. “I am happy to say we got that from them.”

Pool A Fixtures (SA times, all matches live on SuperSport)

Saturday: SA v France (9.12pm)

Sunday: SA v Great Britain (12.13am), SA v Argentina (3.46am)

Springbok Sevens Squad

2 Ryan Oosthuizen 3 Impi Visser 4 Zain Davids 5 Ricardo Duarttee 7 Ronald Brown 8 Selvyn Davids 11 Siviwe Soyizwapi 12 Shilton van Wyk 13 Mfundo Ndhlovu 14 Quewin Nortjé 19 David Brits 21 Zander Reynders 24 Tristan Leyds