Tuks beat neighbours from Joburg in exciting Varsity Cup battle
For the third consecutive week Tuks' Varsity Cup team got their management and fans to experience nail biting tension with their performance against UJ, when they had to erase a huge backlog to win the game.
Tuks’s rugby team must have used up all of their proverbial ‘nine lives’ on Monday night on their home turf trying to ensure they remain victorious in the Varsity Cup Tournament.
In the end, it was mission accomplished and Marius Verwey and his teammates were able to get off the field with a bonus point victory. Tuks had beaten UJ 26-24.
However, they had given new meaning to winning by a hair’s breadth. After 80 minutes of play, Tuks was still trailing UJ by three points. Luckily, they had the ball in hand and were on the attack. One mistake and it would have been game over.
For 43 seconds continuously Tuks kept on relentlessly attacking UJ’s goal line. All the time they were encouraged by a boisterous crowd chanting “Tuks of Niks”. It was clear that something had to give, and it did. Tuks managed to set up an overlap, which enabled the fullback, Lionel April, to dive over in the corner for the winning try.
It was the third week in a row that Tuks had to come from behind to ensure a victory. A relieved Tuks’s head coach, Nico Luus, was not amused.
“Tonight is undoubtedly the worst performance since I started coaching Tuks. One has to give the players credit for the way they staged a comeback. It takes character, but no team can afford to fall behind in every game before starting to play winning rugby. At some stage, we are going to run out of luck,” said a relieved Luus.
However, the coach emphasized that the team and managing staff will have to do some serious introspection.
“We might not like what we see when we look into the ‘mirror’,” he warned.
According to Luus the most worrisome aspects of last night’s performance was the lineouts.
“In our first two games, we had a 100% record. Against UJ we battled to retain 50%. Our ball-handling skills and defensive play was all shocking,” he remarked.
Handling errors on the UJ goal line indeed led to Tuks twice missing out on scoring tries.
The one thing that surprised was Tuks’s on field decision to never go for the posts when being awarded a penalty. They instead opted to kick for the corner flag. It was undoubtedly one of the reasons Tuks found themselves with their backs against the wall in the dying seconds of the game.
Luus admitted that they might have erred but then immediately added that the reason they went for the corner flag was that they backed themselves to win the lineout and then score.
“Thing did not work out as we planned, but the important thing is that we are still unbeaten and that we had scored a bonus point try in each game,” Luus concluded.
Tuks’s number eight, Hanru Sirgel, deservedly got the man of the match award. From the kick-off, he was in the thick of things. Putting his body on the line bashing opponents forcefully out of the way and going for hard-hitting tackles.
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