The Vodacom Bulls boosted their URC home playoff push with a 54-19 win over Zebre on Saturday, but are sweating on winger Cheswill Jooste’s fitness.
The 19-year-old, who was one of the try-scorers in a dominant first half, made way for Stedman Gans at the start of the second half.
“The only little bit of, if I can call it, a negative is that Cheswill hurt his hamstring,” Ackermann said. “It’s undetermined. We’ll have to make a medical assessment to see how serious it is.”
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The Bulls coach admitted his side will need to sharpen up quickly despite running in eight tries against the Italian side.
“First of all, job done. I think that’s the most important,” Ackermann said. “It wasn’t always pretty. The game didn’t have a lot of fluency at one stage.
“There were a few unnecessary penalties, some silly knocks, but over the 80 minutes when we needed to score, we scored, and when we needed to defend, we defended well.”
The Bulls coach warned that those mistakes could prove costly in the playoffs.
“We just gave away soft errors,” he said. “Hopefully we tidy up those things because against the teams we’re going to play going forward, they will punish you.”
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Ackermann, though, took plenty of positives from the heavily rotated side which featured 10 changes, with several players gaining valuable minutes before the playoffs.
“Those guys needed the game time,” he said. “Marco [van Staden] played 80 minutes [at hooker], Willie [le Roux] played 80 minutes [at flyhalf] and hasn’t done that for a long time. Canan [Moodie] got good game time [in the midfield] coming back from injury and a lot of combinations were tested.”
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“If we get players off the bench in the next couple of weeks, at least everybody has experience starting and coming off the bench and making a difference.”
Photo: Anton Geyser/Gallo Images
The post Ackers: Cheswill injury the ‘only negative’ appeared first on SA Rugby magazine.
