Boks face off against Romania without injured hooker Marx

The defending Rugby World Cup champions, will today face off against Romania at Nouveau Stade de Bordeau in France.

The match will be the Springboks’ second game of the tournament after they silenced their critics in their opening match with an 18-3 win over Scotland last week.

In their opening match last Saturday, Romania were walloped 82 – 8 by Ireland, the biggest loss of any team in the competition so far.

The Springboks suffered two major injury setbacks this past week, with hooker Malcolm Marx ruled out of the remainder of the tournament after a freak training ground mishap and lock Eben Etzebeth set to be sidelined for another week after injuring his shoulder last Sunday.

Sebenzile Nkambule spoke to SABC rugby commentator, Renier Swar about what fan can look forward to in today’s match.

“The blow to Marx is a big blow for South African rugby, I mean he’s regarded as the best hooker in the world and to loose somebody like that in crucial matches coming up, it’s very important that we must have another plan and I think Nienaber has that. Nienaber with his whole selection of the team already proved that there’s something up his sleeve about this whole injury. I’m not worried about the Etzebeth injury, they took him off after 20 minutes play in the first match and we knew that we are playing Romania this weekend so he wasn’t one that would have been selected to play this weekend. He has enough rest … he will definitely be playing in the game against Thailand next week which is the most important game for South Africa in the pool stages…”

The #Springboks team that will take on Romania in their second #RWC2023 Pool B game in Bordeaux tomorrow, kick-off at 15h00 🇿🇦#StrongerTogether pic.twitter.com/UY2LXIUU7v

— Springboks (@Springboks) September 16, 2023