Irate Isuzu Southern Kings chair and consortium head Loyiso Dotwana has warned his coaches and players he will not tolerate the high number of yellow cards the side have been conceding in the Guinness PRO14. So far the Kings have been on the receiving end of 22 yellow cards and two red and this has left them with a poor disciplinary record in the European League. Within hours of being elected chair of the Kings, Dotwana made it clear where he stood on the disciplinary front. “If you look at the stats the number of yellow cards we have had is the highest in the competition. We cannot allow that to continue,” Dotwana said. “Both the coaching staff and the players must take full responsibility for that. We will bring all those accountabilities into the side for next season. Dotwana said the franchise were facing three big challenges. “The first one is to obviously to mobilise additional financial resources for the franchise. The second one is to strengthen our coaching structure. We do not have depth in our coaching structure. “An immediate task will be to strengthen the coaching structure. “The third thing is we have not had a good rub of the green and we have lost a number of games. We must strengthen the playing resources and to be quite frank to improve our discipline on the field.” The Kings have battled to make headway in the PRO14 and have lost 15 of the 17 games they have played. On Saturday they face another tough challenge when they face top Irish side Ulster in Belfast. On several occasions this season Kings head coach Deon Davids has bemoaned his sides poor discipline saying it had been costly. He was irritated by the showing of his players after they were blanked 43-0 by Munster last month. They had three players sin-binned, and that left them hamstrung against a Munster side who ran in seven tries and delivered a strong second-half showing. Kings No 8 Ruaan Lerm was carded in the 35th minute, and later replacements Tertius Kruger and Andisa
Ntsila also found themselves in the naughty chair. “We undid a good performance in the first half by some bad discipline in the second half,” Davids said. Referees and the Kings have not been seeing eye to eye, and this resulted in a plan of action being devised last year to get both parties on the same page. Matters reached a head when the Kings had 22 penalties awarded against them against Ulster in Port Elizabeth at the start of the season. “What we have done was to get in Mark Lawrence and Stuart Berry, who work for SA Rugby, and also with the PRO14 to look at our game and areas that we can improve in,” Davids said.
“So they were here in Port Elizabeth and we had an in-depth look at where we need to improve,” he said.
“We also wanted to get a background of the referees and their culture. Referees from different countries look differently at certain things.
“The Kings have to understand how referees react and what their focus areas are. “So we have made a concerted effort to better understand them and for them to look at the way we do stuff so we can improve in areas where we concede so many penalties.”