FIJI Water Flying Fijians hooker Sam Matavesi says they will need to give Portugal the “utmost respect” when they face off on October 9.
The match will be the decider to whether Fiji progresses any further at the 2023 Rugby World Cup in France.
The side was taken to the wire against Georgia yesterday, coming from 0-9 down in the first half to register a 17-12 win.
Matavesi said while it was a “tough game” they “ultimately still won”.
“As you can see everyone is a bit frustrated, the performance wasn’t good enough, we know that, for a lot of reasons, but we still won and we still have a massive game next week to get through to the quarter-finals,” the Northampton Saints player said.
“Next week we’ll put a lot more into it. If we got five points today we’d have been through (to the quarter-finals) and that’s an ideal world, but it hasn’t come to that so we still have to turn up, beat Portugal, give them the full respect and we’ll see.”
Matavesi gave credit to Georgia to taking the game to them, frustrating the Fijians at times.
“People think of Fiji and they think of fast-flowing and scoring tries from our own tryline that are incredible, but I think as we’ve seen at this World Cup, to win these games, it’s set-piece first. Our line-out wasn’t good enough, we were losing collisions, but we still won.
“In the past with Fiji in these games we’ve lost, we haven’t found a way to come back, so to actually come back and win is a massive credit to this team.
“I don’t want to take any credit away from Georgia, they were outstanding, but we need to give Portugal the utmost respect that they deserve. If we can get ourselves right then I think we’ll be fine, but obviously (it’s about) us doing that.”
He said the message at halftime was to “get back to basics”.
“… We were sort of losing the contact in defence, we needed to start winning some collisions, start going forward, we were hitting quite close to their ruck and then going wide without really earning it, and it was easy to defend, but that’s full credit to Georgia — I thought they were really physical, really good.”
