The DHL Stormers will have to rediscover their mojo quickly as the top of the log Glasgow Warriors will be in Cape Town this week determined to bounce back from their humiliation at the hands of the Fidelity Secure Drive Warriors and likely to field a much stronger team.
Glasgow’s coach Franco Smith admitted that his team had been struggling because of the thinner player depth available to his club than he believes is available to the South African teams and it will explain why the former Springbok assistant coach mixed up his selections for Ellis Park.
The message was clear when he left several star players either out of the team and the bench - “We are targeting the game against the Stormers as the must win on this tour”.
It makes sense too considering that the Warriors were knocked out of the Investec Champions Cup, which they had high hopes of going all the way in, in their home quarterfinal against Toulon in Glasgow just a week before the game in Johannesburg.
There’d have been the inevitable hangover after such an emotional defeat, as well as the fact the Glasgow players had played several tough games in a row.
It was time for Glasgow to refresh and reset and they should be far more formidable opposition for the Stormers than they were for the Lions. Stormers director of rugby John Dobson admitted after this team’s unexpected 33-24 defeat to Connacht that the plan was to get overseas for the last two games of the regular season against Ulster and Cardiff “with less pressure on us”.
Well, that plan was scotched by the Stormers’ sloppy performance. As well as Connacht, who themselves weren’t at full strength, played in the game, the Stormers did conspire against themselves by deviating from plan.
DISTURBING HOME GROUND HABIT HAS FORMED
The good news for Stormers fans is that Dobson knows that. The bad news is that in saying so he was just repeating what he has said before previous home games, which is when the Stormers tend to fall into the habit of being too loose and being guilty of over-playing.
“We were very loose and there were patches in the first half when we just tried to shovel the ball around without doing any work,” he said.
“At halftime we said let’s be more direct, maybe play some one pass rugby. There was something curious about us in this game. It was like we felt we needed to invent in order to get it down, to beat them. But we didn’t need to do that.”
Dobson admitted the Stormers maul had been potent and made ground but it wasn’t used enough and it didn’t convert enough. What was missing was the clarity of plan that seems to infuse the Stormers when they play overseas and indeed when they won at Loftus in March, but which often goes missing when they play in Cape Town.
The unspoken about drive to entertain, with the emphasis on entertainment, appears to be a frequent stumbling block at DHL Stadium, which has looked much less of a fortress for the Cape team this season as they have tended to look more vulnerable there than in many of their away games.
NEED TO RETURN TO EARLIER TEMPLATE
To beat Glasgow they will need to return to the balance, structured and more direct approach of some of the earlier games, dating back to their whitewashing of Leinster in their opening URC game in September last year. That was arguably their best home performance of the season so far and also the one where they had the most clarity, something that led into an impressive sequence of five consecutive wins on foreign soil.
That overseas record will be something for the Stormers to cling to and provider of hope if they do end up having to travel in the knock-outs, something that became more likely due to their failure to pick up even a bonus point against Connacht, who are a good team but who you’d still expect the Stormers to beat in Cape Town.
“We always said we needed to win three of the last four games in order to hit our target (which is a top spot finish on the final log) and now we will just have to go all out to win the remaining three,” said Dobson.
“But it has become tough for us now. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but our hope was that we’d win our two home games to take the pressure off when we go overseas.
"We have won in the northern hemisphere so we will certainly go there with confidence, but you never know what might happen on a 4G surface in a night game against Ulster or Cardiff.”