The Springboks have three matches left before they kick off their Rugby World Cup defence in September and every moment will be crucial for the team to learn how they will go about holding onto the Webb Ellis Cup, if Pieter-Steph du Toit’s musing are to be taken to their logical conclusion.
The 30-year-old insisted after the Boks recent 22-21 victory over Argentina, that important lessons were being learnt and crucial deficiencies that needed correcting were revealed, and once the squad plugs those gaps, they will be better for it.
Said Du Toit: “As a team, we feel like we made a step up from last week.
“We started good against Australia and the first 20 against New Zealand we let ourselves down a bit and then the last 60 we were good again. Here, it was a difficult game again but of course you must take the negatives and the positives out of each game.
“We must get better. The more mistakes we make now, the more stuff we can learn. We can learn from the mistakes that we make.
“Of course, there must come a stage in the game where you start scoring and playing well, but there is enough time for us (to do that). We are still in the 'pre-season'.”
The season proper then, should start on September 10 when the Boks face Scotland in their opening match of the World Cup in Marseille in what is surely a campaign defining clash. Before that, however, the Boks will face Argentina early Sunday morning, the World Cup team will then be announced next week Tuesday, before final warm-up games against Wales and New Zealand in the UK.
Du Toit did not travel with the 26-man squad on this Sunday morning to Buenos Aires but will rather rest and recuperate from a busy outing at Ellis Park this week. He, nonetheless, briefly opined where he believes the team must improve for the Pumas come this weekend.
“From the second last game against New Zealand,” he said, “we know that we must step up from the first whistle to the last whistle. That is something we must focus on.
“Of course, in this game, our discipline was a bit bad. We gave a lot of penalties away at critical stages all over the field and we put ourselves under pressure at certain stages.
“It is something that we are learning and as long as we learn we will definitely get better,” he reiterated.