Vodacom Bulls coach Pote Human admitted that his side’s poor defence allowed the Crusaders to walk away with a 45-13 victory on Friday.

The Crusaders exploited a number of poor one-on-one tackle attempts to score seven tries and hand the Bulls another heavy defeat to a New Zealand team at Loftus.

With a tough tour coming, which will see the Bulls play the Brumbies, Blues, Rebels and Highlanders, Human says his team will need to improve defensively to get anything from those games.

‘We know we are better than this,’ Human said after the match. ‘This just was not good enough. If you miss one-on-one tackles against these guys, you are going to be standing behind your posts. That was really disappointing.

‘As I said, we will learn and will work hard on it for the next few games.’

Bulls captain Handre Pollard added that the Crusaders’ counter-attacking ability made it difficult for the hosts to adjust their kicking game.

‘We kicked a bit longer in the beginning because they tend to run back quite a bit,’ Pollard said. ‘But then you are putting all your chips on your defence. That is where the problem came, missing our one-on-one tackles. It is hard to recover from that.

‘Then we went back to the contestable kicks, but we couldn’t get into the air. There were a lot of small things building up to it. It looks like we were just kicking possession away, but it actually wasn’t.’

Photo: EPA/Muzi Ntombela