There was an old song, shared by Tom Jones and Elvis, that included the lines “the green, green grass of home”. The DHL Stormers might well end up feeling like that this week, even though they are heading away from their home ground in Cape Town and to the supposedly inhospitable environment of Loftus.
Make no mistake, there is a lot that There was an old song, shared by Tom Jones and Elvis, that included the lines “the green, green grass of home”.
The DHL Stormers might well end up feeling like that this week, even though they are heading away from their home ground in Cape Town and to the supposedly inhospitable environment of Loftus, counts against the Stormers as they head into the return Vodacom URC derby against the team they beat 13-8 at the DHL Stadium at the beginning of January. For a start, there was a change to kick-off time.
“I was also under the impression that we were playing the game at 5pm, that was what I was expecting, and then someone told me no, it is now at 2pm,” said Dobson earlier this week.
The time was probably changed to fit into television scheduling so that the millions of fans watching on television can move seamlessly from the theatre of conflict at Loftus to the absorbing final round of the Guinness Six Nations, without leaving their sofa or lapa, to deliver them a four match Super Saturday.
That is a gain for the broader rugby public, but not for the Stormers, as the earlier kick-offs on the highveld in summer do make life more uncomfortable to visiting teams, be they the Bulls’ fellow South African rivals from the coast or teams from overseas.
MARCELL’S EXPLETIVE SUMMED IT UP
Indeed, given the expletive that snuck out of the mouth of the Bulls captain when he was asked in the Supersport post-match interview what it was like to play in the heat after this team had thrashed the Lions down the road at Ellis Park last month, it doesn’t sound like a game at altitude that kicks off just after lunch is that much fun for the highveld based players either.
The Stormers feel they may have gained a bit this week from the heat wave that made Cape Town and environs feel like Dubai over the past few days.
“It is very uncomfortable playing at that time of the day up there but it is what is and we just have to adapt,” said the Stormers’ experienced prop Neethling Fouche. “It is going to be very hot here this week so at least we will have trained in the heat, even if it is not altitude.”
THE WEATHER GODS MAY PLAY BALL WITH CAPE TEAM
As it turns out, the discomfiture index at Loftus might be a lot lower for the Stormers on Saturday than it has been on the green, green fields of home in the buildup. The temperature hit 41 degrees in some parts of Cape Town on Wednesday, and the Stormers took the step of bringing their training forward as a way to avoid the hottest time of the day. Not that it would have helped much as it was already over 30 quite early in the day.
It turns out that the weather in Pretoria on Saturday afternoon could erode any advantage the hosts might have drawn from the conditions pertaining at the early kick-off time. A few days out from the game, a high of only 23 degrees was predicted, with cloud cover and perhaps a spot of rain. After sweating it out in the Cape heat, they might feel like they are going into someone else’s winter.
A FIRM LOFTUS PLAYING SURFACE WILL MAKE VISITORS SMILE
Not that the weather conditions are the reason why the Stormers might walk onto Loftus singing about those green fields of home - it has everything to do with the ground they will feel under their feet. Let’s not be polite about it, the playing surfaces the Stormers have played on since December, when they played the Lions at DHL Stadium a week after a motor-cross event at the stadium that turned the field into a sandpit, have been rubbish.
Okay, they did go to the Stoop in London in January to play the Harlequins, and they have played an away game at Hollywoodbets Kings Park, where the field might have been okay although there are other factors in Durban, like the humidity, that make for an unpleasant playing experience.
But their home field has been a nightmare, and contributed to turning the scrumming into a lottery on occasions, not to mention the weird bounce of the ball, and they also visited Johannesburg last time out to play the Lions.
Without wanting to denigrate that franchise for surely there were climatic conditions that contributed to it (rugby should not be played in South Africa in the summer months), the field at Ellis Park was even more sub-standard than the one at DHL Stadium.
Both in the Stormers game, and the one the previous week against the Sharks, the field at the stadium in Doornfontein was loose, with large clumps of turf and grass being lifted every time there was a scrum.
“I don’t want to get into trouble but at the professional level of the sport it should be seen as unacceptable when you have to change the position of a scrum by five metres (because that patch of field is churned up) as it does change the game,” said the Stormers coach John Dobson.
“We are looking forward to what we hope will be a firm surface to play on for a change,” he added.
The Stormers will be hoping their home field will be back to the expected standard when they return to Cape Town for a run of home games, starting with next Sunday’s game against the Dragons. It is being played on a Sunday because there is another event that would have made the game impossible to play in the originally scheduled time slot on the Saturday.
It would be an understatement to suggest that being the City of Cape Town’s anchor tenant at the stadium in Greenpoint has been far from plain sailing for the Stormers up to now and the city fathers are not making it easy for Dobson’s team to fulfil their mission of “making Cape Town smile”.