The Springboks will face Scotland, England and Wales over the next three weekends in Edinburgh, London and Cardiff respectively.

As the world champions head into testing after five wins from six Rugby Championship matches, there will be three key areas that coach Rassie Erasmus will want to see improvement on the British tour.

Here are the boxes the Boks will want to tick this month.

Domination on set pieces

While the Boks were the Rugby Championship’s top try scorers with 24 and dominated their opponents most of the time, they were not as clinical as they would have hoped in scrums and lineouts.

They awarded some penalties to scrum time and finished the competition as the fourth best scrum unit, winning 79% of their scrums. New Zealand were first with 91%, followed by Australia and Argentina, who were both successful with 87% of their scrums.

In lineouts, Ruan Nortje was the Rugby Champs’ top winner with 32 catches, but the Boks finished second overall, behind the All Blacks, for lineout success. Much of their ball wasn’t consistently clean either, perhaps because Nortje was the new call-up with so many lock injuries in the team, while several pitches missed the target.

With prop Frans Malherbe absent this tour and the hooker line-up under the microscope, there will be plenty of eyes on the Boks in set-pieces this month.

Discipline

Players from all teams have been harshly dealt with by officials in recent months when it comes to “dangerous tackles” and accidental headers, with the Boks receiving seven yellow cards during the Rugby Championship.

Fortunately, they haven’t been too affected playing with 14 men at times, but they will certainly want to do better in the UK this month, where referees and TMOs will certainly be keeping a close eye on proceedings.

The above-the-shoulder, heads-up tackle will often be a debatable 50/50 decision, but where the Boks need to be more disciplined is at breakdowns and set-pieces where they have been lapped fairly regularly these days. lately.

Maintaining good discipline in all departments and not imposing light penalties will be key if the Boks are to remain unbeaten on tour.

Kick

We never want to point fingers at individuals in a team game, but we must Manie Libbok having not missed a fairly easy shot on goal in Santiago against Argentina, the Boks would have remained undefeated at the Rugby Champs.

Penalty shooting was generally not of the highest standard, with Libbok, Jaden Hendrikse, Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu and Handre Pollard handling goalkicking duties during the Rugby Championship. Everyone has had their ups and downs.

In their six Rugby Champs matches, the Boks achieved a conversion success rate of 63.6% while their penalty success rate was 78%.

In matches that promise to be tight this month, notably against Scotland and England, in difficult conditions, every point will be crucial and penalties will inevitably be important.

With Feinberg-Mngomezulu not on tour, Libbok being the best attacking number 10, but Pollard probably the best kicker, it will be interesting to see who Erasmus supports as a fly-half and as the team’s first-choice kicker .