John Mitchell: Lions maul 'smoked' Bulls

Bulls coach John Mitchell expressed his discontent at the way his forwards were dominated at the maul in their 49-35 loss to the Lions in Pretoria.

The Lions used their set piece and maul to devastating effect to score as many as five of their seven tries.

Mitchell said the Bulls’ set-piece issues impacted on other areas of the game, as their backline could not get clean ball.

‘It was a disappointing performance. Firstly, the Lions deserved their win. I thought their forwards were outstanding and they got us in one area.

‘They exposed one system that we have been developing and doing pretty good at. But that one system conceded four opportunities and led to two yellow cards. That feeds into the rest of the game.

‘It was an amazing game. You only have to have one area going wrong, from a forward aspect, and it can feed into so many other aspects of the game.

‘They didn’t catch us out. This is something that we practise every week and for some reason, we clearly didn’t get our timing right to be able to deal with it.’

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Mitchell bemoaned the impact that the two yellow cards, to reserve prop Conrad van Vuuren and reserve loose forward Nic de Jager, had on the game.

‘That didn’t help. The contest was back in at 21-21 and it looked like it was going to be a humdinger and then they got a couple of sanctions that went their way and built their pressure through that area again.

‘To defend with one yellow card is pretty hard most of the time but two [is tougher], especially two forwards.’

The Bulls will next face the Reds, Chiefs and Crusaders on tour and Mitchell says the coaching group will look at what went wrong in the loss to the Lions.

‘It wasn’t a good performance and we will need to understand why. We will have to go back to our process and identify where we as a coaching group failed the players and where the players have missed details.

‘At the end of the day, it is an easy review. We got smoked in the one area, so if we get that sorted we will be back into it again.’