Springbok captain John Smit admitted that his side has plenty of to do in the wake of a convincing 30-13 defeat at the hands of Australia.

South Africa head home empty handed after the three opening matches of the 2010 Tri-Nations, making a title defence unlikely.

"When you go away from home you've got to try to get some points, we haven't done so," said Smit.

"So we've got a lot of work to do back home.

"We haven't really played our game yet ... We've got ourselves to blame for three weeks," he added.

"We're not on the money really on anything really.

"We're going to have dig deep, work hard and make sure we can actually put some rugby together before we assess (whether) we're in the right direction.

"(Tackling's) probably been the poorest facet our last three weeks. And we're very realistic, how poor, how average we've been in most areas in the last three weeks," Smit said.

"We'll be the first to say that we've been poor, the defence has been poor, the breakdown's been poor.

"I think when you have a good season it's harder the next season and you've got to work even harder so we've got to make sure we do that work so we can get some pride back at home.

"It's nice to get home but we're also disappointed we're not taking any points back."

Discipline once again let the Boks down as two yellows cards - for Jaque Fourie and BJ Botha - didn't help South Africa's cause as Australia looked to keep ball in hand.

"It was [a fast tempo]. So it should be, that's the way you want to see it played," said Smit.

"We've just got to try and make sure we keep our full team on there for the full 80."

Coach Peter de Villiers said his team paid for not cashing in on their chances.

"We didn't get the result that we badly wanted. We did put some good plays together but we didn't capitalise from that," said De Villiers.

"But the Wallabies were quite sound today, they were hard on the ball, all credit to them."

planetrugby.com

25/07/2010