By Brenden Nel.
Canada’s spirited second half performance gave the Blitzboks a massive scare in their second Pool C game at the Vancouver Sevens on Saturday night, but a late try by Selvyn Davids saw the Blitzboks sneak home 19-14 and stay unbeaten.
After going 12-0 up by halftime, the second half belonged to the host side, as they found holes in the Blitzbok defence and had a fortunate bounce to score two converted tries and put the series leaders under a lot of pressure as the minutes counted down.
Davids eventually found the hole, as he so often does, in the defence to break local hearts and send the Blitzboks into a showdown with Australia for pool honours.
JC Pretorius and Ronald Brown scored the other first half tries, but Canada’s David Richards and then Cooper Coats dotted down to give themselves a chance of victory.
Earlier the Blitzboks bounced back from their disappointment in Singapore with a strong opening win in the Vancouver Sevens, beating Spain 31-12.
The Blitzboks had suffered three consecutive losses in Singapore, ending a 36 match unbeaten run and then crashing out of the Cup and 5th place playoffs in the South Asian country, but had spoken all week about raising their standards when they got to Canada.
Things didn’t kick off well for them as they conceded the first try as Eduardo Lopez crossed early to put Spain in the lead.
But that didn’t last long as the Blitzboks kicked into gear and scored three first half tries, the first coming through a speedy run by Darron Adonis.
He was followed by a brace on either side of halftime by captain Siviwe Soyizwapi, who took control of the game before Dewald Human looked to have burrowed over the line with the referee the only one seeing the grounding.
Impi Visser added the last try to complete the big win but Spain found some consolation as they scored in the final minute through Tiago Romero to put themselves into double figures.
The Blitzboks’ final pool game against Australia takes place at 03.33 (CAT, GMT+2).
Meanwhile MKenya caused a major upset by taking some revenge on the USA from last week’s loss in Singapore, pipping the Americans 19-17 in a closely fought game.
Last weekend a poor conversion cost the Kenyans as they lost the same fixture 12-10 when they should at least have drawn. Kenya are in the same pool as Fiji and England with the Fijians beating the English side 27-12 in their opening pool game.
But in their next game against Fiji, they hit a wall, with the Fijians running out easy 38-7 winners.