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Pretoria - Following their 22-16 defeat to the Brumbies in Canberra on Friday, Bulls coach Frans Ludeke said his side’s fate now lay in the hands of other teams and results elsewhere.
Two superb individual tries by Brumbies wing Henry Speight saw the Bulls slump to their third defeat of their Australasian tour and their 10th consecutive loss abroad.
“It is out of our hands and we almost need a favour or something to happen but we would like to finish well and we can’t control what happens in other games,” Ludeke said after the match.
“So there is still hope and we have one more game on tour and we need to make sure we play well enough to get the result.”
The Bulls will next face the Rebels in Brisbane next Friday before they return to South Africa for their final match of the regular competition against the Cheetahs in Pretoria.
The Pretoria side slipped further down the overall log to ninth position on 36 points and are two points behind South African Conference leaders the Stormers, who can open the gap when they host the Cheetahs in Cape Town on Saturday afternoon.
Even if the Bulls win their remaining two matches, they could still find themselves out in the cold should the teams ahead of them on the log win their matches over the next fortnight.
Going into the half-time break on Friday the Brumbies held a narrow two-point lead before the Bulls took the lead after the restart with a Handre Pollard penalty.
However, the match swung in the Brumbies’ favour two minutes later as Speight got the ball from a scrum where he first stepped Pollard before handing off another player to score.
He crossed the whitewash again in the 58th minute as the Brumbies took a 22-9 lead.
“We really defended well and we diffused some of their key players, but the two special moments from Henry Speight were the difference in the game,” Ludeke said.
“That is Super Rugby for you, where special players create moments like that that win games.
“We also needed one or two of those tonight and I thought we worked our way into good positions, but it was a pity we couldn’t convert it as being six points down we were still in it.”
Although the Bulls responded with a Lappies Labuschagne try to get within six points, they could not get the breakthrough as the Brumbies defence held.
"I thought we were competing until the end of the game, we were creating opportunities," Ludeke said.
"We just needed one more closer to the line, maybe a penalty for a maul, which gave us a lot of rewards.
"Their rush defence closed us down, I thought the rolling maul worked well for us but we just needed another one (chance)."
