Simon Zebo has warned South Africa that Ireland have the style of play to beat them and that they are still fired up from Eben Etzebeth accusing them of arrogance at the last Rugby World Cup.<\/b><\/p>\n
Ireland have won four of the five meetings between the nations dating back to 2016 and their former wing says the way they are set up makes the world champions a team they like to play.<\/p>\n
Ireland\u2019s attack will stress Boks\u2019 defence<\/p>\n
\u201cIreland<\/a> has the style to beat them because of Ireland\u2019s short passing,\u201d Zebo told Planet Rugby. \u201cWhen that structure and shape is done well the defence that you\u2019ll have the most joy against is a team like South Africa<\/a>, who have out-and-out line speed and come at you.<\/p>\n \u201cPlaying under that structure, we quite enjoyed playing South African teams because you know the defence will come to you and we have so many options off the hip, with these short passes, to exploit that.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very hard defensively to do those repetitive efforts against Ireland.\u201d<\/p>\n Zebo insists Ireland, who sparked their autumn campaign into life with a record win over Australia in Dublin last weekend, \u201cdefinitely have the tools\u201d to hand South Africa their first loss of the autumn series.<\/p>\n He also says they will not want for motivation, remembering back to their last meeting in Europe, at the 2023 World Cup, when Ireland were ranked number one in the world and beat the Boks in a pool match. That win extended their winning streak to 16 and had them installed as joint tournament favourites.<\/p>\n Springboks are world leaders in low, legal tackles and stats prove it, Rassie is right to be fuming<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Etzebeth\u2019s comments<\/p>\n Afterwards, Etzebeth claimed \u201cprobably 12 out of the [Ireland] 23 when I shook the hands told me, \u2018See you guys in the final\u201d.<\/p>\n Speaking on The Rugby Pod, South Africa\u2019s most-capped player added: \u201cIt just felt like they were just so, so confident saying things like that, \u2018See you in the final\u2019 when you knew you had got the mighty All Blacks coming in a World Cup quarter-final.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s good to be confident but you can never be arrogant in this game.\u201d<\/p>\n How Eben Etzebeth knew \u2018arrogant\u2019 Ireland would not reach Rugby World Cup final<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Asked whether Ireland would still use that to fire them up, Zebo said: \u201cOh, yeah, for sure.<\/p>\n \u201cI know Rassie will be doing the same with South Africa with how he\u2019s able to mentally charge his team up and get them prepped for battles.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019ll be interesting to hear what Andy Farrell can use. I\u2019m sure there\u2019s plenty of ammo there. It makes for an enthralling game. It\u2019s just going to be so good. I can\u2019t wait.\u201d<\/p>\n To this day Zebo, now a pundit for Premier Sports, finds it hard to believe more than half the Ireland team would have come out with such a remark given they had a quarter-final against New Zealand which, we now know, they lost.<\/p>\n \u201cI was surprised [Etzebeth said what he did], I just didn\u2019t really believe it,\u201d the ex-Ireland star said. \u201cI can see how he can get caught in a story and he might over-exaggerate a little bit.<\/p>\n \u201cI just don\u2019t know if that many players would have said that.<\/p>\n \u201cYou never know. Fair play to him, he backed himself anyway. That\u2019s what you want to see. He\u2019s obviously world-class and not afraid to stand his ground on his word.\u201d<\/p>\n World Rugby Awards winners and losers: All Blacks and Lions snubbed, \u2018justice for props\u2019, Springboks domination and \u2018farcical decision\u2019<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Ireland are good enough<\/p>\n South Africa, with two Irish coaches in Jerry Flannery and Felix Jones, go into the game as favourites to win in Dublin for the first time since 2012. Bookmakers have Andy Farrell\u2019s side down as six-point underdogs.<\/p>\n Etzebeth, set to win his 140th cap, said: \u201cWe\u2019re excited. When we received the calendar at the beginning of the year, this fixture was definitely one that stood out.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite liking the match-up, Zebo cautioned: \u201cWith Ireland\u2019s style of play, it\u2019s very dangerous if you make errors.<\/p>\n \u201cIf there\u2019s lots of handling errors you will get punished immediately. The ruck, the physicality at the breakdown, will be huge.<\/p>\n \u201cIf Ireland can match the Springboks and keep their ruck speed at under three seconds they should be good enough to beat them. But it could be a long evening if South Africa get on top physically and slow that ruck ball down.<\/p>\n Simon Zebo is part of the Premier Sports team bringing every game live throughout the Investec Champions Cup season including the Final in May 2026. The tournament kicks off on Friday 5 December with 15 EPCR games live on Premier Sports every weekend.\u00a0 Visit\u00a0https:\/\/www.premiersports.com\/gb<\/a>\u00a0to join in from just \u00a311.99 a month.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Simon Zebo has warned South Africa that Ireland have the style of play to beat them and that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":188363,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[9,10,105545,18,13,14,6,794,19,34943,17,11,12,15,16,5,105546,5258,7,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-188362","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-eben-etzebeth","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-featured-news","13":"tag-featurednews","14":"tag-headlines","15":"tag-home-page","16":"tag-ie","17":"tag-internationals","18":"tag-ireland","19":"tag-latest-news","20":"tag-latestnews","21":"tag-main-news","22":"tag-mainnews","23":"tag-news","24":"tag-simon-zebo","25":"tag-south-africa","26":"tag-top-stories","27":"tag-topstories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115574589518502734","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188362\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}