While pleased with what he saw in his team’s 65-38 win against Xerox Golden Lions, DHL Western Province Head Coach John Dobson believes that they can improve further as the Currie Cup season unfolds.

Dobson’s team ran in nine tries at Emirates Airline Park to make it three wins from three in their Currie Cup title defence, but that does not mean they will be taking anything for granted going forward.

With just a single round of action before the play-offs, DHL Western Province know that they cannot afford to take their foot off the pedal and will be looking to make another step up when they host Tafel Lager Griquas at DHL Newlands next weekend.

Dobson was a satisfied coach following the win in Johannesburg, which saw his charges execute the plan to hand the Xerox Golden Lions their first defeat of the season.

“We executed the plan of how we wanted to play and we got the result we wanted, having said that I think there were a couple of turning points in the first half which took the pressure off.

“The last 15 minutes were 14-14, which is a great achievement for us up here,” he said.

Dobson made shrewd use of the rolling substitutions to keep his players fresh at altitude, which helped to deal with the intensity of the home side.

“One of the things that we identified this week was to be cleverer with our substitutions. It is not ideal to have your captain off after 30 minutes, but to have your captain back on to close out the game is fantastic,” he said.

However, there is still room for improvement defensively, having conceded five tries and Dobson acknowledged that they will take a good look at that area this week.

“We weren’t overly thrilled by our defence, we knew that they had steppers and we had to catch up hard on them, which I don’t think we always did that well.

“At this pace and altitude against a team with that manny steppers, you are always going to concede four tries. They are a really good attacking team.

“Two things in the negative column today was perhaps our maul defence because we conceded two maul tries and we gave them too man linebreaks,” he said.

DHL Western Province captain Chris van Zyl was thrilled to get his first win at Emirates Airline Park in a blue and white jersey.

“I have been coming here with Dobbo since 2015 and we have never been able to win, so we are ecstatic about that.

“We knew that they would have energy and belief that they could come back from any scoreline,” he said.

Van Zyl said that the focus for his team is to continue their winning momentum, with just three games left before the play-offs.

“From an attacking point of view we can be pleased, but there are still three more games to go [before play-offs]. Our goal was to get a home semi and a home final in front of the DHL Newlands Faithful and I think this was a key step,” he said.