A delighted Jake White got the reaction he expected from the Vodacom Bulls, a nine-try rout of Ospreys in Pretoria on Saturday to snap a two-game losing streak.

The Bulls needed to bounce back after going down to defending champions Munster in the Vodacom URC in the SA capital last week, which was preceded by a massive defeat at the Northampton Saints in the Champions Cup playoffs.

And it’s exactly what White’s charges delivered this week, enhancing their chances of a home quarter-final in the URC with a comfortable 61-24 win at Loftus Versfeld.

“Someone asked me in the week, ‘what are you looking to get out of the game?’ I said I need a reaction,” White told reporters post-match in a Bulls conference. “The players can’t just talk after last week and say, ‘jeez guys, we’ve let each other down.’

“Then they said, ‘how are you going to check?’ I said when 80 minutes is finished, you’re not going to get much more than that.

“You always want the perfect game as a coach but to score 60 points, probably have two or three tries disallowed and ripped out on the tryline, that could’ve all of a sudden been 80 points.

“You’re always critical about things and I wouldn’t really have liked to have leaked three tries like we did, but there was a lot of hard work at the end to make sure they didn’t get another one.

RECAP: Nine-try Bulls trample Ospreys

“You want a reaction and you want good teams that when they lose a game, the next week they almost take it out on the next opposition. And I think that’s what we saw today.”

The Bulls were magnificent from the start and their driving maul made its presence felt early on with Johan Grobbelaar barging over for the opening score. The backs then combined brilliantly, with Kurt-Lee Arendse and Canan Moodie each scoring a brace of tries while Man of the Match David Kriel, Embrose Papier and Willie le Roux also dotted down.

“Coaches are never happy, let’s be fair, but it makes a statement. Last week that team beat the DHL Stormers in Cape Town, they came with a massive high … and [Ospreys coach] Toby [Booth] came to me pretty humble because we played really well,” White said.

“When I spoke to the ref after the game he said, ‘jeez, it was amazing.’ He thought we were going to go direct and when he looked again, we were going around them and flying down the side of the field. That says a lot because that’s the way we want to play, we always want to make sure we have variation to our game.

“We want to make sure that people expect us to play with our forwards because we’ve got to be good enough to do that, but we also have to be good enough that when you expect us to play with our forwards we play with our backs, and I think we got that balance nicely tonight.”

The Bulls will now have a week’s break before they regroup for a visit from fellow front-runners, the Glasgow Warriors, on Saturday, 11 May.

Photo: @BlueBullsRugby/Twitter

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