The unbeaten Stormers will adopt a ruthless approach and throw everything they can at Benetton when the sides clash on Saturday, forwards coach Rito Hlungwani says.
The Cape side have made a flying start to their United Rugby Championship campaign and view the showdown against the Italians as an opportunity to further boost their points tally.
Hlungwani said Benneton would be a tough nut to crack in Treviso and the Stormers needed to be ruthless and convert every opportunity to secure a vital fifth victory.
“The Stormers will be throwing everything we can at Benetton,” Hlungwani said. “It will be nice to finish the tour with another win, and it is extremely important to us.
“Before we left Cape Town, we set certain goals, and we need to make good on those goals.
“We are happy with the progress and what we are doing; we just need to step it up a bit. We need to break the opponent more; there is room for us to be more ruthless.
“Maybe one of the things we can improve is that we had four or five opportunities and we converted just one maul against Zebre.
“Three or four of those mauls brought penalties, so that was good, and the one led to Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu scoring a try on the blindside.
“But the forwards should probably look to be driving over the line and scoring those tries ourselves. We want to go over the try line at every opportunity.”
Loose forward Ben-Jason Dixon said the Stormers had to ensure they came away with points when they exerted dominance over the opposition.
“We are a long way short of being as clinical as we could be,” he said. “We have been working on the cohesion of the forwards and the backline, but we need to make more of our forward dominance.
“The Stormers sometimes make heavy weather of it by not taking our opportunities.
“But there is another aspect of it, the slow poison aspect. We tackle them back, we put the ball in the air, we chase the kicks, we give the opposition trouble at the line-outs and the scrums.
“The Stormers know that eventually it takes its toll. It makes it difficult for the opposing team and that is slow poison. The way our set piece has been working has been really encouraging and it does boost confidence when the set piece is working well.
“However, I know coach Rito says it every time, but it is true — we are not close to arriving yet. There are some serious teams out there who will test us. We don’t want to be caught off guard.
“So we are under no illusions that we have arrived as a team. We know where we can improve,” he said.
“We view Benetton as a massive challenge. We saw how Italy played against the Springboks when they were in SA and we know how well they played against the Lions at home.
“It is a massive challenge and we know we have struggled in the past at this venue. We see it as a type of playoff game in Treviso.”
