The term fairy-tale can be overused when applied to sporting achievement but in the case of the first United Rugby Championship (URC) title holders, the Stormers, it is apt.
Even as recently as January, before they started their sequence of derby wins that preceded their run of success against overseas teams, you’d have got 66-1 on the Stormers going all the way.
But it wasn’t just their lowly position on the early overall log that made the final outcome so special. The Bulls were listing even lower than the Stormers on the log in January. They were last but one to Zebre. Had they won the final they too would have been able to claim a grand comeback of sorts.
What the Bulls did not go through was the uncertainty and the chaos that just a year ago had Western Province rugby all over the media for all the wrong reasons. Stormers’ replacement tight head Neethling Fouche summed it up it at the post-match media conference: “For a while we weren’t sure whether we were going to be paid.”
This column focused a lot during the Covid lockdown period on the incompetence of the elected officials who were dragging WP through the mud. Politicking and interference were problems that had to be put up by a long line of WP and Stormers coaches, but none of the previous presidents had the suicidal tendencies of Zelt Marais.
Zelt who? Yes, the eccentric former WP president has seen his name fade into the background and swept off the news pages and cyber space by the exploits of John Dobson and Steven Kitshoff’s team.
For the first time in what feels like decades, rugby has become the main thing in the Cape, and the upshot is a connection between the supporters and the Stormers team that seemed a fanciful thought just a short while ago.
Unfortunately, some aspects of the national government are as incomprehensible as the previous WP administration, so we didn’t see the full house at Cape Town Stadium for the final that might have been the case were it not for the ridiculous 50% capacity policy.
But it might as well have been full for all the noise that the 31,000-crowd made from the start of the game through to the finish. There were many great crowd occasions at the former home venue for the Stormers and WP of Newlands, but I can’t remember it buzzing in the sustained way the stadium did in this final.
Even when the Stormers were being placed under intense pressure by the Bulls in the first half-hour of the game the noise and the support was voluble, but it felt like it reached a crescendo and stayed there once the Stormers got their bit between their teeth around the 32nd minute and got into the game.
The Stormers players rode that tidal wave through to halftime and then let it carry them through a second half where they were dominant. They were so much better than the Bulls for the last 50 minutes that it was hard afterwards to comprehend that the visitors were within a converted try of walking away with the trophy themselves.
Obviously playing three consecutive playoff games in succession helps when it comes to creating a connection with your support base. And in that sense the Stormers do owe the Bulls some gratitude for the performance they produced against Leinster in their Dublin semifinal. The Stormers would have played the final in Ireland otherwise.
Ultimately though there can be no quibbling with the argument that the best team in the competition, judged purely on the bread and butter of wins and losses, won the trophy. The Stormers lost just four games, fewer than any other team, and since the beginning of the year their record reads played 16, won 14, lost just one and drawn one.
That drawn game was a microcosm of parts of their season. They were well out of it going into the final quarter against the Sharks in Durban, and yet found a way to come back and earn a share of the spoils. It was a performance that spoke of huge self-belief and a refusal to die, something we saw again on many occasions after that, but particularly in their exciting semifinal win over Ulster.
The upshot of all of this is not just that the Stormers finally have a big international regional trophy to brag about, the asking price of would-be equity partners has soared too. They were offered R112m by the American consortium that eventually made a deal with the Sharks, apparently the latest negotiations are around figures closer to R200m.
We still have to see how the Cape off-field drama will play itself out and the future of the cash-strapped union remains uncertain, but what Dobson and his team proved over the past few months is what many of us for a long time believed — remove the clowns from the circus and it suddenly isn’t a circus any more but a business that has the potential to soar and thrive.
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