Springbok hooker Malcolm Marx is anticipating a massive battle against Argentina in tomorrow’s Rugby Championship final at the Mbombela Stadium. Marx was, however, full of praise for Los Pumas and their accomplishments this season, saying they had a great game last week.

“It was a great game last week for them.  You can see they’ve beaten each team in the Rugby Championship, which I think is the first time in history they’ve done that so it’s an awesome achievement for them.” He said the Argentinians play an exciting game of rugby.

“We slacked off in certain areas last week for some reason.  We’ve obviously had a recap of the game to see where we can improve and get better and we worked on that this week.  So hopefully we can put it together for a full eighty this weekend.”

‘Argentina are a physical team’

Since the tournament started in 1996 – without Argentina – as the Tri Nations, the Boks won three titles, in 1998, 2004, and 2009. When Argentina joined in 2012 the competition became the Rugby Championship and the Boks won the title in 2019, but with that being a World Cup year the competition was shortened to just a single round of fixtures. Marx said while Argentina are a physical team, all the participating teams in the competition brought their sense of physicality to the table.

Argentinian coach, Felipe Contepomi, has made seven changes and a positional switch to his starting team.  In the forwards, Santiago Grondona replaces the injured Marcos Kremer at blindside flanker while fellow loose forward Juan Martin Gonzalez and Pablo Matera swap places on the bench. Lock Pedro Rubiolo shifts to number 4 in a new-look lock pairing with Tomas Lavanini.

Tomorrow’s match at the Mbombela stadium kicks off at 17:00.

OFM Sport/Ilse Smalberger dg