Ulster gained some revenge for their two tight defeats to the DHL Stormers in last year’s Vodacom United Rugby Championship by beating the champions 35-5 at Kingspan Stadium in Belfast on Friday night.
The home team was super efficient and professional in their approach. They did what the Stormers expected them to do by playing them into the corners and keeping them camped in their half. However, it is one thing knowing what to expect, another thing entirely stopping it.
Given that the Stormers were already fielding a changed team, with not a single combination surviving from last week’s good win over Clermont-Auvergne in the Heineken Champions Cup, the last thing the Stormers needed was to suffer early injuries to further compound any disjointedness that might emerge.
Whether or not they’d have struggled as much had it not been for the first half injuries to hooker JJ Kotze, No 8 Evan Roos and flyhalf Jean-Luc du Plessis is a moot point. It would have had an impact though, particularly on a defensive system that looked a lot less organised than it normally does. They’d also had late changes shortly before kick-off, with Kade Wolhuter coming into the starting team as an 11th hour change at fullback for Clayton Blommetjies and Junior Pokomela dropping out for Marcel Theunissen.
While Ulster were able create half gaps with relative ease and managed to apply pressure by taking the ball through several phases, the Stormers struggled to get out of first gear when it came to their attacking game. In the second half Wolhuter and Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu made some impressive individual breaks but in the first half Ulster were almost perfect defensively while the Stormers missed tackles.
This was also a night where the Stormers were without their two ace ball scavenging flankers, Deon Fourie and Nama Xaba, so they struggled to slow down and turn over Ulster ball.
The hosts by contrast had none other than the formidable figure of Springbok No 8 Duane Vermeulen playing off the back of the Ulster scrum. Vermeulen was on a few occasions the man who disrupted the best Stormers attacking intentions as in some of the rare instances they were under pressure they turned it over by winning breakdown penalties.
Kotze was stretchered off the field in the fourth minute, and that brought the Stormers’ veteran Bok hooker Scarra Ntubeni onto the field long before he’d have preferred in his comeback game after a long lay-off through injury. An area the Stormers did not suffer though, at least not early on, was the scrum, where the experience of Brok Harris, Ntubeni and Ali Vermaak, who was playing his landmark 50th game, combined to force a scrum penalty in the eighth minute.
Most of the penalising though was against the Stormers, and that and the excellent kicking games of the Ulster halfbacks Nathan Doak and Bill Burns ensured they spent much of the game in their own half, with Ulster playing in what they’d probably refer to as the right areas of the field.
There were several well worked tries for Ulster, but one of the best of them was the first, which came in the 15th minute, as Doak went over from near the Stormers line and the conversion of his own try made it 7-0.
Whereas the Stormers were struggling to hold onto the ball when they had it, and initially Ulster also made mistakes in a scrappy start to the game, slowly but surely Ulster became more composed in taking the ball through the phases. Composure and patience was a hallmark of Ulster’s second try, which was dotted down by wing Ben Moxham in the 22nd minute to put daylight between the teams.
The Stormers looked like they were settling in the second quarter but struggled to break down the organised and determined Ulster defence. The Stormers’ best scoring opportunity came when they were awarded a penalty under the posts in the 32nd minute and they should really have taken the kick as it would have been something concrete to show for the improvement they were starting to show.
Instead they went for a scrum and when the ball went wide off that set piece Ulster ended up in possession and then later on their was a penalty that sent the play back deep into the Stormers’ territory. The try Ulster scored on the stroke of halftime to make it 21-0 was a forward drive effort that the Stormers might have felt they were unlucky to concede as there was no video evidence of the touch down the on-field referee thought he saw. If he was so sure, why did he refer it?
It is a long time since the Stormers trailed to anyone by 21 points at halftime but while they needed to score quickly after the restart to get back into the game instead it was Ulster’s All Black capped former Hurricanes prop Jeffery Toomaga-Allen who crossed for the bonus point try and a 28-0 lead for his team. ?That was effectively game over with the Stormers playing just for pride after that. Ulster scored probably the best try of the match to their fullback Mike Lowry in the 57th minute after which the Stormers did a fair amount of attacking but it was against a team that was as good defensively as it was in other aspects of the game. The Stormers did well though to finish with a flourish as replacement Andre-Hugo Venter, a hooker covering flank who ended up playing hooker when Ntubeni came off early in the second half.
Scorers
Ulster 35 - Tries: Nathan Doak, Ben Moxham, Nick Timoney, Jeffrey Tomaga-Allen and Mike Lowry; Conversions: Nathan Doak 4 and Jon Cooney. DHL Stormers 5 - Try: Andre-Hugo Venter.