Mike Tindall slams South Africa Springboks team ahead of Rugby World Cup faceoff
Mike Tindall says that South Africa shouldn’t even be in the semifinals of the Rugby World Cup, just one week before their matchup with England. When the two teams faced off in one of the game’s highlights on Sunday, the 45-year-old admitted that he was ardently cheering for France to win against the Springboks.
Tindall is familiar with the prerequisites for winning the Rugby World Cup. The former Gloucester and Bath player retired in 2014 after winning 75 caps for his nation. He was part of the 2003 victorious England team.
It is generally expected that England will lose versus South Africa, even though Steve Borthwick’s squad has won five of their last six games since the competition started.
Though he isn’t fully sure that the Springboks are everything they are cracked out to be, Tindall isn’t sugarcoating his assessment of their most recent 29-28 triumph against Les Bleus.
“I was more emotional about that game than the English game,” he said in an interview with The Good, The Bad, and The Rugby. “I just wanted France to advance to their rightful position so badly.” They were by much the better team during the match, and they should have won.
“South Africa had three pictures of box kicks that were handled incorrectly, yet they lost in every statistic. Despite their lack of output, South Africa consistently does that throughout World Cups.
In 2019, I said, “It would be a disgrace if South Africa won the World Cup,” and they did. When all is said and done, France should have won the game.
Following their victory over Fiji in the quarterfinals, England coach Borthwick hailed his team’s big-game mindset and said they would be “written off” against the Springboks again. But Tindall has distinguished between knockout rugby and the rest of the rugby variations, suggesting that the Red Rose might still spring a surprise at Stade de France.
“The biggest factor in this is that you’re now in semi-final rugby, and what that does for the pressure levels,” he stated. The only time you have to trust in someone is during rugby knockouts. It’s not like viewing a TV show in the fall.
There are only a few decisions to be made in the 80 minutes that make up the single game. It all depends on their intentions, albeit sometimes [England] will adopt a siege attitude. Why aren’t we able to play one semifinal match, just like South Africa did?
