Rassie Erasmus heaps praise on debutant's performance against Georgia

South Africa were made to work hard for the victory by Lelos despite the 45-point margin, with Erasmus not overly thrilled by the final scoreline.

The Boks' head coach gambled on a brand new front-row with Boan Venter, Marnus van der Merwe and Neethling Fouche all making their Test debuts in the fixture.

While he was pleased by their scrummaging performance, an area of the game that the Georgians are renowned for, he does feel there is room for improvement for the front-rowers.

This despite Van der Merwe producing a flawless lineout display and scoring twice, while Venter also grabbed a debut day try.

"I think they did fairly well," the Springboks boss said.

"It's interesting to put new guys out in a game like this, and you look at the scrums, and they did okay, but then there are some general play errors, how to stop a maul and there are guys in sync with us.

"We saw that early on and I know Siya was also off for that maul try. A maul is just as technical as a scrum sometimes and then in general defence, they made some errors but you can't look at the scrums in isolation.

"But some errors in general attack, ball carries, clearout and so on. So we had seen enough by that point."

Attention now turns to the Springboks' Rugby Championship defence with the Boks boss set to name his squad for the opening Tests against Australia on Tuesday.

Reflecting on the first four matches of the year, Erasmus was rather pleased by the performances.

"We're fairly happy if you look over the four games," he said.

"We scored close to 50 points in each match and apart from the first Italy test when they defended pretty well.

"Georgia were physical and disruptive but that's not an excuse for us making so many errors, but I guess we must understand that if we chop and change teams like we have as we're building squad depth, you'll lose rhythm. We are fairly happy but we can always do better.

"But it was a stop-start game but what we expected from them was physicality and being disruptive and they certainly did that. In the end, the guys handled it, but it wasn't a performance where we did that for 80 minutes.

"We found that again in the last 20 minutes and we can be fairly happy with the scoreline, although one can always do better."