Mallett on the scrummies....a grim assessment

On the Bok scrumhalves

'What concerns me is that neither of the two scrumhalves today [Francois Hougaard and Cobus Reinach] played with confidence. What we don't realise is how much we're missing Fourie du Preez. His calmness and his accuracy is something that you can't replace overnight with two youngsters.

'Hougaard today dithered over the ball and when Reinach came on he didn't improve the situation either. He looked flustered. There wasn't calmness. We showed our glaring weakness at scrumhalf. We had much more possession than the Irish, but at key moments our scrumhalves let us down.

'The success of our performance against England is going to depend on good transformation from our scrum to our backline and that comes through the scrumhalf.'

Hougaard made 62 passes 2 or 3 of which were poor......the rest were spot on, just as they were against NZ.

He was average on the day, but reality is, poorly informed supporters look at the poor passes only and define his game accordingly.......its short sighted and ignorant.

Hougaard was one of many who was average on the day  

Sharktwat, the problem with uninformed supporters like you, is that you deal in the hype and not the facts. Hougaard's performance as a whole has been defined by the 3 bad passes he made and his two fumbles.......its much like JJ's last performance against the AB's where his performance as a whole was defined by his miss on Barrett, notwithstanding the fact that both Morne and Jean missed him as well and the fact that he was outstanding with ball in hand that test is completely ignored by ignorant supporters.

So with regards to Hougaard, yes he threw a few bad passes and he fumbled the ball. But the fact remains that of his 62 passes, a high percentage were damn good and on the money........they were exactly the same as the ones he delivered in the Oz and Kiwi test where his performance was heralded.......so to say he was that poor is simply not true. Are you stupid enough to tell me that Hougaard on his trip to the UK has all of a sudden lost his ability to pass huh? Fact is he made over 50 good passes, but idiots like yourself who know so little about the game, define his game as a whole based on the few negatives. Its as bad as saying your goal kicker had a shocking game because he missed 80% of his kicks......something useless Moffie did re Boshoff in the CC final. One would swear kicking at goal defines a players game as a whole, much like 3 poor passes versus 59 good ones.

He did not have a great day, but neither was he anywhere near as bad as most hyped up sheep have us believe he was.