Warren Gatland has accused South Africa of dragging out last weekend’s drawn-out second Test in Cape Town.
The first-half took 63 minutes to complete, which the Lions coach blamed on the Springboks continuously looking for stoppages – including going down injured at several scrums and changing studs.
And he claimed that such a bloated, stop-start affair wasn’t fair on supporters wanting to watch a good match of rugby.
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“I think there’s two things there,” said Gatland when asked about the tempo of the game.”One is looking at the ball, and keeping the ball, and also talking to the officials about how we keep the game flowing.
“I think every scrum there was an injury slowing the game down, there were something like 14 minutes of TMO time in the game.
“We’ve worked pretty hard from a conditioning point of view, and it was really, really stop-start. That made it frustrating for us.
“We want to keep the tempo of the game up, to get the ball in and out of scrums, to get the ball in quickly at lineouts, to play and get a flow. South Africa at the moment don’t want to do that.
“Everything at the moment is so stop-start, and it does make it frustrating. I know Alun Wyn Jones was talking to the referee on a number of occasions about keeping it going. We had stud changes, we had TMO decisions, we had the referee stopping the game for cramp.
“That will be one of the things I talk to the referees about this week when we discuss – we need to make sure, we can’t have 60-odd minute halves.
“It’s important we keep that flow of the game, as much from a spectator’s point of view. We want to see some pretty good rugby, and we didn’t see some great rugby played at the weekend.
“It would help, like I said, if players weren’t going down for injuries on a regular basis and stopping. You want that flow in the game and we’ve seen from other games that when we’ve had that tempo we’ve played some really good rugby.
“It was very frustrating for us and particularly for Alun Wyn on the weekend. He was talking to the referee on a number of occasions asking him to speed up and you could hear the ref through his ‘mics’ as well encouraging both teams to keep the flow of the game going because it was so slow. Yeah, we definitely want some tempo.
“With a team going with a 6-2 split as well and just how long the halves have been, how little minutes in play we’re actually getting. It’s definitely not something to our advantage and we need to work on that and make sure that we keep up that tempo this weekend.”
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