Captain Lionel Cronje lauded the team character and culture of the Kings after securing a famous 35-32 Super Rugby win over the Sharks in Port Elizabeth on Saturday.
When the Kings started this Super Rugby season with just one win from seven, it appeared as if the Port Elizabeth-based side was doomed to failure.
However, the unheralded team from the Eastern Cape has steadily improved in recent weeks, which included claiming a famous win over the Waratahs in Sydney, before backing that up with another stunning 44-3 thrashing of the Rebels.
Despite this sequence of results, few would have expected the Kings to come up trumps against the highly-fancied Sharks, and yet there can be no doubting the fact that the hosts were fully deserving of victory at the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium on Saturday evening.
The Kings produced surely the complete performance of their Super Rugby history to score four tries to two and power their way to a thrilling win.
Cronje, who is a former Sharks player, said it was a result that reflected how far the courageous Kings have come.
“It was a really hard-fought game, but I’m just really proud of the guys, we played for the full 80 minutes. We’ve got to know our culture and our identity. We know what our strengths are, and we’ve kept working on those strengths, and that paid off in the end,” said Cronje.
The Kings will next host the Brumbies this coming Saturday (19h30 kickoff), and there is every reason to believe they could secure a fourth successive win.
“We’re just going to keep doing what we’ve been building on,” Cronje commented. “We want to play for ourselves, the fans and people of Port Elizabeth. All we can control is what happens between the four lines, and that’s what we did. Hopefully, this win against a South African opponent will earn us some more credibility.”
The Kings’ jubilation was contrasted by the disappointment of the Sharks, who led by four points late in the game, but couldn’t close out the result.
“We had a tough start, and we knew the Kings were going to come out and put a lot of pressure on us,” exasperated stand-in skipper Philip van der Walt commented afterwards. “I felt we got into the game a bit more in the second half, but we didn’t handle our exits as well as we should have. The Kings capitalised, and congrats to them.”
The Sharks will now travel to Singapore to take on the Sunwolves.
