Stormers to go for broke against the other Sharks

The DHL Stormers saw off the challenge of the Hollywoodbets Sharks between Christmas and New Year but this week they will be defending their DHL Stadium fortress against another type of shark - the Sale Sharks from England.

The Stormers will be heading into their second home Investec Champions Cup game, but their first in Cape Town as the first one was played in Gqeberha, with some of the pressure off in the sense that after losing at home to Toulon and then away to Harlequins they have only a minimal chance of advancing to the round of 16.

However, with the other teams in their group set to play each other over the next few weeks, Stormers coach John Dobson knows there is still a chance his team will advance if they win their two remaining matches, with a trip to France to play Racing 92 the next in line for them.

It might be set up for a good Stormers challenge for the round of 16 spot they have secured in their two previous Champions Cup campaigns in the sense that much has changed since their last game in the competition, when effectively a second or third string combination was outplayed by Harlequins at the Twickenham Stoop.

Not only have influential players like Deon Fourie come back into the system after recovering from injury, they could also have Evan Roos and Sti Sithole available for this weekend. But more than that, they were the big local winners over the two weekends of URC derbies, winning both games against the Emirates Lions and the South African version of the Sharks with full points.

DERBY WINS RELIEVED PRESSURE

That has relieved much of the pressure that was hanging over them and Dobson is no longer working on the Champions Cup preparations with one eye on what is to come next in the URC.

What is to come next is in fact a trip to Leinster on 25 January, but that works perfectly for the Stormers in the sense that it should mean that there is less of a logistical challenge around that game and the Champions Cup clash the previous weekend with Racing 92.

“It does fall quite nicely for us in that we can treat the trip to Paris and then Dublin as a proper tour and, depending on what happens against Sale, we can go into both games at full strength,” said Dobson after his team beat the Durbanites at DHL Stadium just before New Year.

Why going into the Paris game full strength depends on the Sale Sharks result is because a defeat in Cape Town on Saturday will effectively put the Stormers out of Champions Cup contention.

There’d then be little point in going Full Metal Jacket, as Dobson would put it, against Racing 92, and it would make more sense to select with the following week’s game in Dublin in mind.

But Dobson is hoping the Champions Cup challenge will still be on when his team flies out to Paris next week and his intention is to go for broke against Sale.

“We know how hard it is now for us to advance to the knock-outs of the Champions Cup and the home defeat to Toulon really hurt us,” said the Stormers coach.

“But we have achieved our mission of getting full points from our last two URC games and feel we are now in a position to give the Sale game a good shot. We will give it a full go and If we get full points from it, then we have something to play for when we go to France and we can build from that into our next big URC game against Leinster.

“We will go full strength against Leinster regardless of what happens and regardless of what team they select. Going to Dublin with the intention of winning will be a nice challenge for us and there is an opportunity as the Six Nations starts the following week and Leinster would have just come off two hard Champions Cup games.”

TIMING OF DUBLIN CLASH MIGHT BE OPPORTUNITY

Indeed, Leinster face a repeat of the 2021/2022 and 2022/2023 Champions Cup finals when they play against La Rochelle this coming weekend and there is an intense rivalry between the two teams because of the history.

And Dobson is right with what he is implying when he talks of opportunity - Leinster have two thirds of the Ireland starting team playing for them and the national team will either be in a pre Six Nations camp on the weekend of the Stormers game or at the very least have their minds switching to that competition.

Neither of the two derby wins were achieved without blemish but then that is maybe a good thing - the Stormers won comfortably against a Lions team that had pretensions of a top four finish before they visited Cape Town and while the Sharks had injury problems and hung in to the last minutes, the Stormers were still comprehensively better than the Durban side and should have scored more than their four tries. That on a day when they made a lot of errors.

“We feel that we are on the right track now and aspects of our game that we have been working on are coming through to good effect. That we won these games with room for improvement is promising.”
The Stormers team for the Sale clash will be announced on Friday.