Griquas 'visiting' at home as they host Cheetahs

THE TAFEL Lager Griquas will be ‘visiting’ at home when they host neighbours the Toyota Cheetahs in their second match of the Carling Currie Cup competition at Tafel Lager Park. The match kicks off at 1pm on Saturday.

It was confirmed that Griquas recently sold their headquarters to the Sol Plaatje University. CEO of Griqua Rugby, Arni van Rooyen said the transfer should be finalised during the following three weeks.

“It does not make financial sense to hang on to the stadium as the maintenance costs are exorbitant,” Van Rooyen told the DFA. “We will just hire it from the varsity and everything will continue to run as normal.

“Most of the other rugby unions have also got rid of their stadia but this has no bearing on us,” he added.

The rugby union exco and Sol Plaatje University will liaise regularly to work hand-in-hand to ensure a smooth relationship.

“The University’s other sports venues are located next door and they would also like to host the Varsity Cup competition and can also use the facility for both rugby and soccer,” van Rooyen concluded.

However, all this boardroom business is not the focus of Griquas who one week ago were given a 30-16 rugby lesson by the Cell C Sharks in their first game of the competition. The hosts came heavily unstuck allowing their KZN visitors to run in four tries to the two by the Griquas.

Griquas coach Scott Mathie said he was hopeful that the errors of the opening game would not be repeated. “We were our own enemies in many respects,” Mathie told the DFA. “We are looking forward to the Cheetahs game – it is always a challenge (to face) this Cheetahs team.

“Even though they lost only two Springboks, they are going to be like any of the Cheetah sides with a very quick tempo with some dangerous players in the backs.

“I think we are going to have to be accurate with our clean out game especially with players like Clayton Bloemmetjies,” Mathie added.

Hopefully, all Griquas' mistakes have been ironed out; last week bad ball handling, poor kicking, untidy line-out work, terrible on-field decisions and scrum pressure were their undoing during much of the game.

Mathie said that he was aware of what went wrong last week, and they have worked on remedying the problems. “From my side we will want to do well in our broken field of play like we did last week . But we want to launch from our set pieces to attack as that is an area we would like to address to make sure we press on point attack.

“We also want to try to limit the Cheetahs to break down their tempo and stop them with their dominant tackles and be on top of these types of things.

“It is going to be an interesting game and a really bruising battle as most derbies are, so we look forward to that and how some of the guys play on Saturday,” the coach added.

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— Griquas Rugby (@GriquasRugby) June 24, 2021