Stormers fans who go hard at their team for their loss to the Glasgow Warriors and their lowly 13th position on the United Rugby Championship (URC) log as we reach the international break do need to keep a few mitigating factors in mind.
There were enough injured players sitting in front of the press box watching the game at the Danie Craven Stadium to give the team that started the match a good run for their money. Second, the Warriors are not a Mickey Mouse team. Any team that can go to Loftus to win a final, as Franco Smith’s team did last season, has a lot going for it.
I thought their trip to SA might hurt their challenge, as it did when they left the highveld last season with two defeats and little to show for their efforts, but instead they managed to pick up seven invaluable log points across their games against the Sharks and Stormers.
They scored four tries in both games, giving them eight tries against five across their two fixtures in this country. In both games they showed an impressive ability to strike with the kind of flair and X-factor, plus a heavy offload emphasis, that is supposed to be the hallmark of the Stormers.
Indeed, it was the Stormers who inspired the change of coach that brought Smith into his position. It was after what now still ranks as the Warriors’ only defeat to the Stormers, at Cape Town Stadium in April 2022, that Glasgow opted to change. And what they wanted was what they saw from the Stormers that day.
But that performance and run of success is suddenly starting to feel a long time ago for the Stormers. With their first game after the month off being against what should be a fully loaded Sharks team, they are the local side under the most pressure and coach John Dobson has much to think about before that end of November trip to Durban.
Astute contracting
The Sharks are the antithesis of the Stormers in the sense that they’ve made huge use of their cheque-book over the first few seasons of the URC. It hasn’t worked until now, mainly because the Sharks’ all-round contracting had been abysmal since 2013 and there appeared to be ignorance to the fact that you can’t just buy success in rugby; There has to be a strong team culture.
That culture has been developed now and the contracting has been more astute and I fear they and the Bulls, who have also brought in a lot more players than the Stormers have over the past few seasons, are set to move ahead of the Cape team. Which is disturbing because the Stormers are the most supported local team, certainly when it comes to bums on seats, with 28,000 at the previous game at DHL Stadium against Munster and the much smaller venue in Stellenbosch close to capacity for the Glasgow game.
It’s reasonable to suspect that a crowd of more than 30,000 would have watched the game had it been played in Cape Town. The weekend’s experience does highlight the downside of the Stormers being tenants at their main home ground and not owners. The switch was made because of a country music concert booked for the stadium years ahead, but it happens too often.
Not that the venue shift to Stellenbosch, where the conditions at the early kickoff neared a sweltering 30°C, explains the appearance of something being a little off with the Stormers in comparison with their first two seasons, where they made consecutive URC finals.
The key word may be desperation. Every time a Stormers’ player is asked about the Stormers’ slow start to the season in a media session the response is that the team has been in this situation before.
What is important to ask though is whether the team feels the same level of desperation when it takes the field as it did in those previous seasons. And here, with Dobson admitting at the post-match press conference that insufficient hard work was being done off the ball against Glasgow, may lie one of the problems.
The Stormers had much to prove in those first two seasons. When they won the competition, they were responding to having been written off, to having a much smaller budget than the Sharks and Bulls. Their triumph was seen as a fairy-tale, and ditto when they hosted the final again the next season.
But with success comes expectation, and this is where I agree with embittered Stormers supporters who argue that the equity partnership with Red Disa should have enabled Dobson to make more than just three signings, one of which was an emergency call to Dave Ewers when Evan Roos was injured.
A mid-table finish would have been OK for the Stormers in 2021/22 but now that isn’t good enough. More liberal use of the cheque-book may be necessary for the Stormers to consistently meet the expectations they have created.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.