Dave Rennie addresses All Blacks' three obvious problems in Stormers win

All Blacks head coach Dave Rennie has emerged from the first game of the Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry tour happy with his team’s character, but disappointed with their discipline, aerial ability, and how they fared in the scrum.

New Zealand was penalised 16 times in the game, many of them in the opening half, resulting in back-to-back yellow cards in just the 11th and 12th minutes. A third yellow was shown in the 77th minute, by which time a flurry of late New Zealand tries had put the game beyond reach.

The scrums contributed heavily to the penalty count, with starting tighthead prop Pasilio Tosi pinged four times in his 47 minutes on the park, and things didn’t get any better when the reserves entered the match.

Meanwhile, in the backfield, New Zealand struggled mightily in the aerial contests, constantly scrambling as 20-year-old Stormers debutant Yaqeen Ahmed and veteran halfback Dewaldt Duvenage peppered Beauden Barrett with high balls that all hit the deck.

Rennie told reporters following the match that it was “nice to get our campaign away with a win”, but he was very aware that his side “need to be better, and we will be.”

“It’s a good introduction for us to South African rugby and a proud province,” Rennie reflected. “We obviously started pretty well, and it felt like which side had the ball got rewarded by the referee. Set-piece-wise, we gave away a number of scrum penalties, and they were able to piggyback their way (up the field), and then a handful of maul penalties and obviously yellow cards.

“So, for us to give away as many penalties as we did, have a couple of yellow cards and go into halftime in front highlighted a lot of the character that the boys showed under a bit of pressure.”

While the coach praised his squad for how they “barred up” while down to 13 men, he also acknowledged there were some clear work-ons for his men ahead of a midweek showdown with the Sharks in Durban.

“Look, when we had the ball we were really dangerous,” Rennie said. “We knew they’d bring a lot of line speed and in quite dewy conditions, it made things difficult at times. We just weren’t quite clinical enough to really expose them.

“We knew that they’d come at us with their set-piece. So we’ve got to be better in those areas. We expected a lot of aerial attacks and again we probably didn’t deal with that as well as we wanted. You’ve just got to try and pick up scraps there because they’re just trying to tap it back as opposed to catching it.

“They’re all things that we expected, and we would have hoped to have dealt with them a little bit better.

“We just showed a heap of character, and we’re very well conditioned; we felt like if we could hang onto the ball, we could eventually find space and hurt them, and we were very clinical late in the game.”

The scoring dam burst in the 66th minute, with Rieko Ioane darting over from a pick-and-go before fellow outside backs Leroy Carter and Josh Moorby got in on the action within a 10-minute burst. The Stormers were able to respond, but the game ended with a final five-pointer from Asafo Aumua.

One further negative point was starting centre Billy Proctor leaving the field gingerly after an apparent shoulder injury. Rennie had no initial updates to give on the Hurricanes star, describing him as the only “potential” casualty from a physically demanding match.

“He was trying to jackle for a ball and got cleaned out,” Rennie said of Proctor’s injury. “It looks like it may be a shoulder injury, I’m not sure yet. Yeah, there’s a few bumps and bruises.”