The big crowd that turned out at Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium to watch Toulon beat the DHL Stormers will feel they were part of a great occasion but they should also remember the Investec Champions Cup game as one where they saw the best and worst of French rugby.
The good part of French rugby was the first quarter of an hour, where Toulon were quite irrepressible on attack. They punished the early Stormers attempts to tire them out by stretching play and when they took a 10-0 lead after 12 minutes it threatened to be a long night for the Stormers.
The Stormers did fight back, and for the second successive week their pack was magnificent without getting rewarded by the ‘W’ in the results column. They scored an awesome rolling maul try to underline their forward superiority just before halftime.
But what the 27 000 people who filed into the stadium also saw was the ugly side of French rugby. Perhaps, as their coach hinted afterwards, it is the South African reputation for being physical themselves that gets the French players up for battle. This was arguably an instance though where they over-compensated, and the incident that saw French replacement flanker Yannick Youyotte was not the only one in the game where the robustness of the challenge could have been questioned.
SOME STORMERS ERRORS WERE FORCED
While the Stormers made errors, many of those were forced by the sheer physicality of the French approach and the force of the hits, and it left the Stormers coach John Dobson saying that he had a very sore dressing room afterwards. The game also came at significant cost, with the long injury list for the Cape franchise being added to by what looks like long term absences from the playing field for both flyhalf Manie Libbok, who was the target of the Youyotte hit late in the game and was also on the receiving end of quite a few others, and loose-forward Keke Morabe.
Both were rushed to hospital from the field, with Morabe sustaining what looked like his second leg fracture in the space of nine months and Libbok being stretchered off with what Dobson assumed was severe concussion.
“Keke has fractured his leg again for the second time in nine months, which is really tough,” said the Stormers director of rugby.
“I think it’s the same leg but I might be wrong. Unfortunately Manie is very bad. He’s gone to hospital, which isn’t good. With normal concussion you don’t go straight to hospital.”
On top of that the other starting flanker, BJ Dixon, lay prone on the ground for several minutes in the first half after it appeared his head hit the turf when being tackled into touch. The golf cart came out to carry him off but the tough player he is, Dixon got up and walked to the side. He unexpectedly passed that initial HIA test, but then according to Dobson he failed one later on.
“I don’t know how long BJ will be out for but he definitely won’t be available for our trip to London to play the Harlequins next week,” said Dobson.
INJURIES GO DEEP
With two tough local Vodacom United Rugby Championship derbies to follow the Champions Cup game in London, the Stormers were always intending to send a second string team to The Stoop anyway, but Dobson is now in a position where in some areas he doesn’t know where to look for reinforcements.
Regular captain and occasional Springbok captain Salmaan Moerat returned to rugby from his injury enforced layoff by playing for 30 minutes in a Stormers second team friendly against Griquas on Friday, which incidentally they won to break a lengthy drought against that team, but the injury list remains a ridiculously long one.
Libbok and Morabe, and possible Dixon too, are added to a list that apart from Moerat also includes Damian Willemse, Dan du Plessis, Deon Fourie, Evan Roos, Frans Malhberbe, Steven Kitshoff, Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu as well as the likes of Ben Loader.
“It’s enough to fill up a whole sanatorium,” quipped Dobson, who was in a surprisingly good mood following what was his team’s third successive defeat (they lost to the Hollywoodbets Sharks last week and to the Glasgow Warriors in the game before the international break).
Perhaps he has a reason to be optimistic as well as fatalistic, for given the Stormers injury problems, they did put up a good fight against both the Sharks and a savagely brutal Toulon team who came to South Africa to win at all costs.
“It’s a sore changing room, two guys in hospital, it was a brutal game. Yet we stuck around, the fight from the guys was nice. I don’t think I’ve seen a bigger team. It’s comparable to La Rochelle.
“Some might say I am making excuses but to play that game without Deon [Fourie], Evan [Roos], Keke, BJ, Frans, Kitsie, Damian, Sacha, Manie was not insignificant.”
COULD SNIFF VICTORY
And yet the Stormers, had they taken their chances, particularly when they looked like they were gaining momentum in the middle stages of the match, could so easily have won despite it all, and Dobson is right, you might be able to argue that the Stormers are over-elaborate and try too many 50/50 passes and overdo the chip kicks, but you can’t fault their commitment to the cause.
Prop Neethling Fouche, called on to captain the team in the absence of Moerat and Dan du Plessis, was part of another dominant scrumming effort, which might have counted for more had there been more scrums in the first hour of the game, with both teams opting to play off turnovers created from mistakes and the referee allowing the advantage. Fouche felt that like in Durban the previous week, the victory was there to be taken.
“It’s quite sad actually because you could almost sniff that win. Just after halftime we’re on their goal line; we score there we go 21-10 and they’re probably being asked more questions than us at that juncture,’ said Fouche.
“But we don’t finish there and then it’s penalty, penalty, yellow card (to Willie Engelbrecht), and then you’re under pressure. Teams like these, with lots of internationals, they’re not going to let that pressure go. They’ll just keep their foot on your throat.”
They did and in the end they strangled the Stormers who will now turn their main focus to resurrecting their season by winning the two festive season derbies against the Emirates Lions and Hollywoodbets Sharks at DHL Stadium on 21 and 28 December respectively. They’d probably agree that the Champions Cup challenge is over after losing their first game at home.