Your view of how the DHL Stormers did in the season they have just completed would depend on where your starting point is.
Were it the halfway point of the Vodacom URC season, when they went into their first game against the Hollywoodbets Sharks unbeaten, you’d say they fell short. If it was before their opening game against Leinster last September, you’d feel they exceeded all expectations.
Let’s start with the first one. The mid-season period of unravelling may actually have started a few weeks before the home Sharks game on 24 January. A week after winning a tight home URC derby against the Vodacom Bulls, the Stormers headed for an away Investec Champions Cup group game feeling confident they’d compete with Harlequins at the Twickenham Stoop with an under-strength team.
The mood in the camp at the time, with the Stormers at that stage unbeaten across both competitions, was underlined when a few of the senior Stormers players were interviewed in a Newlands cricket ground hospitality suite during a Betway SA20 match played that week.
They had gone 11 games unbeaten up to that point, so the confidence was understandable, but the way the interview went, with all the talk about success, should have made some of us watching it a bit concerned that they were getting ahead of themselves. If you’d just arrived from Mars and hadn’t been watching rugby, you’d think the Stormers had just won a trophy.
A few days later it looked like the Stormers were expecting to ride over Harlequins without breaking sweat, for after all the Quins were supposedly in crisis then. But it quickly became apparent that the Harlequins had pitched for work and the Stormers hadn’t and watching them concede more than 60 points was akin to watching a bubble bursting.
COMPLACENCY COINCIDED WITH UNCERTAINTY OVER IDENTITY
Whether or not the Stormers were caught out in mid-season by their own complacency only they will know for sure, but it did seem like it. There was an admission that that was what did them in when they lost at home to a Sharks team that for once played with the type of desperation you’d normally associate with the Stormers.
It was a stage of the season when the Stormers also seemed to be grappling with their identity and what game they should play. Having won five consecutive away games in the URC playing pretty much the game that saw them come so close to upsetting Leinster in their away semifinal last weekend, there seemed to be an attitude when back on South African soil, and particularly in Cape Town, that entertaining was almost as important as winning.
It first became evident in a very loose winning performance against a weakened La Rochelle in the Champions Cup in Gqeberha in early December, just one week after they’d been clinical and direct in dispatching Bayonne on French territory. That win in Bayonne came just a week after an excellent first ever win at Thomond Park against Munster.
A week after the ragged display against La Rochelle at the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium the Stormers returned to Cape Town for the first time in a few months and did the same thing against the Fidelity SecureDrive Lions, almost to their cost. The Lions were unlucky not to come out of that game without at least a draw.
SACHA’S TIME AS CAPTAIN WILL COME BUT IT WAS TOO SOON
Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu did not play in that game but he did return for later games where, and Stormers director of rugby John Dobson readily admits it was a mistake, he was installed as captain in the place of the injured Ruhan Nel and Salmaan Moerat.
By the time he was injured in the home quarterfinal against Cardiff, Feinberg-Mngomezulu was in imperious form, but at the time he was the appointed team leader too much was being placed on his plate. As it is, there are times when it feels there is too much reliance on Sacha as a player from his fellow Stormers.
It is anticipated that Feinberg-Mngomezulu’s time as captain will come again, not just at the Stormers but at national level too. But his elevation to the leadership when it did happen was much too soon, and for a while the Stormers struggled to replicate the disciplined approach that had seen them break through the overseas barrier earlier in the competition.
Sure enough, when Nel returned to lead the team in the away derby against the Bulls in Pretoria, the elements of what had worked overseas under his leadership returned and the Stormers, having lost three derbies in a row (the Sharks home and away and the Lions away), won emphatically as they delivered what was considered a statement performance.
THERE WAS SUBTEXT TO IMPACTFUL CONNACHT DEFEAT
There was to be another statement performance later at home against the Glasgow Warriors, but the path they’d opened up with their win at Loftus to steam towards a top of the log finish was diverted somewhat by an unexpected home defeat to Connacht.
The Irish side have developed into a fine team, but the Stormers were expected to win on a day that had followed an emotional week due to the sudden passing of their popular team manager Chippie Solomon.
None of the Stormers coaching staff or players wanted to publicly use that emotion as an excuse, but they admitted it privately. By the time Glasgow came into view, they’d regrouped and refocused and Franco Smith’s team, so long a hoodoo opponent for the Stormers, were seen off with the kind of performance that would enable the Stormers to beat any opponent anywhere.
Well okay, maybe not on a 4G surface, and the one-point advantage that the Stormers had opened up on Glasgow at the top of the log was frittered away in the final two league games away against Ulster, who they drew with, and Cardiff. Had they held onto that advantage they’d have played a home semifinal rather than have had to head to Dublin.
Which was really what did them in. Winning against Leinster at the AVIVA is something few teams manage, and at this point no local side has ever won there.
In the end, they came pretty close to becoming the first, which takes us back to the second way of looking at things outlined in the opening paragraph - what was the outlook at the start of the season rather than halfway through it?
LAST YEAR’S QUARTERFINAL DEFEAT LED TO HARD CONVERSATIONS
If we go back 12 months the Stormers were recovering from a second consecutive away defeat in a quarterfinal to Glasgow, a result that had precipitated both introspection and a bit of a crisis driven by overreaction. The normally amiable Dobson was incensed by some of the media articles written after that Scotstoun loss, although we got the impression he was coming under pressure from higher up.
Dobson admitted that with a shrinking squad he was up against it going forward. He was expected to improve on that season’s fifth place, the second consecutive season the Stormers had finished just outside the top four, but thought it would be a struggle just to make fifth again given that his squad was going to smaller than it had been.
And it was hard to disagree with him as at that point it seemed there were more players leaving than arriving at the Stormers. There appeared to be a developing contracting issue and a growing perception the club wasn’t spending the money it needed to in order to be competitive.
Maybe the penny dropped somewhere though because within days of the hard conversations had in the washup to the 2024/2025 season Wandisile Simelane, who was at the time expected to sign with a Japanese club, was staying. Ruan Ackermann was on his way to Cape Town too.
But those moves off the field, plus the earlier recruitment of Springbok scrumhalf Cobus Reinach and Sharks loosehead Ntuthuko Mchunu to replace the retired Steven Kitshoff, weren’t enough to lift the veil of pessimism that had descended. As the new season neared, the expectation was that the Stormers would do well to keep in touch with the two richer South African clubs, the Bulls and Sharks.
WILCO SIGNING SHOWED CHANGE WAS IN THE WIND
That change was in the wind became apparent when a month before the season kicked off it was announced Wilco Louw was on his way back to Cape Town, not for the season about to start but the following one, but making the knock-outs and retaining a place in the Champions Cup, rather than winning any silverware, seemed about the limit of the Stormers’ immediate ambition.
If you look at it that way, and take the beginning of the new season as your starting point, then the Stormers definitely exceeded expectations. More than that, there have been developments off the field that have considerably strengthened the likelihood that winning silverware is in the Stormers’ future.
Let’s start with the halftime announcement in that Lions game the Stormers were lucky to win before Christmas. The Stormers took the unprecedented step of having Feinberg-Mngomezulu announce the extension of his contract with the Cape team to 2029 to the DHL Stadium crowd. And it was worth that fuss too - having the world’s best flyhalf and most marketable and watchable player on your books long term is a major coup for any team.
A few days later the news leaked that Siya Kolisi was returning home and would be a Stormers player again from July, and while the departure of the two locks, Moerat and Ruben van Heerden, has dented Dobson’s plans slightly, he has been proactive by signing up the experienced Argentinian International lock Thomas Lavanini.
DOBSON IS BEING STRATEGIC WITH HIS SIGNINGS
Then came the announcement of arguably the biggest coup of all, which is the return of double World Cup winner Cheslin Kolbe, who will solve what is an unusual problem for the Stormers to have given the riches they have had there in the past - a lack of genuine pace and strike ability out wide. And if there’s anyone who disagrees with that they should think back to the semifinal against Leinster when Imad Khan broke clear and was hauled in during the second half.
Had the scrumhalf had Kolbe or Seabelo Senatla, who was out injured, up in support he could either have kicked ahead for them to win the race to the tryline or passed it to them and it would have been an almost certain score that would have taken the Stormers into the lead.
Dobson is being clever with his contracting and no he’s not following the approach that the Sharks have been derided for. For none of the acquisitions is he breaking the bank.
CAPE RUGBY FACTORY IS CHURNING OUT A NEW TIER OF PLAYERS
Of course it helps that the Western Cape is a functioning factory for the production of rugby talent, and there’s a whole tier of young players who were blooded at some point of this season who will be ready to play a big role at the culmination of Dobson’s Project 2029 - Markus Muller, just a year out of school, has a Stormers cap, so does Oli Reid, and that is not to mention the players who started to make their move the previous season.
Paul de Villiers has become such an influential part of the Stormers furniture that it feels like he’s well established now, but this past season was his first completed season as a Stormer and he was rightly rewarded with a call up to Rassie Erasmus’ Springbok squad. Zachary Porthen became a Bok during the last off-season, while Imad Khan, just 22, is a scrumhalf with a bright future who appreciates having Cobus Reinach around for him to learn off.
A SEASON WHERE THEY STARTED TO FLEX THEIR MUSCLES
Realistically, even though the Stormers started the season so well and had a comfortable lead at the top of the URC log for much of it, this was never going to be a year where they would achieve their aim of being able to properly compete on two fronts, the URC and Champions Cup. The squad just wasn’t deep enough, some future stars still need developing. But they did start to flex their muscles.
With three group stage wins in four starts in the Champions Cup, and they were really unlucky to lose to Toulon away in their round of 16 game and with Glasgow having been softened by the Bulls in their round of 16 game they might have been ripe for the taking in the quarterfinal, their performance in Europe was much improved on previous efforts.
And going toe to toe with Leinster in an away semifinal in the URC was further indication of growth. Last year the Stormers were outplayed in Dublin by an understrength Leinster team in the league phase.
Dobson may be gutted with the manner his team lost out on a chance to host a URC final, with it all coming down ultimately to that late game red card when Leinster were looking vulnerable and potentially out on their feet, and also how his team blew it at the end of the league season, but he’s having very different conversations now to the ones he was having a year ago.
DHL Stormers’ 2025/2026 Season At A Glance
Vodacom URC
Played 18 Won 12 Lost 5 Drew 1
Final finishing position: 3rd
Beaten 20-11 by Leinster in Dublin semifinal
Investec Champions Cup
Played 5 Won 3 Lost 2
Finished third in pool even though they won three of their four games
Beaten by Toulon in Toulon by one point in round of 16 game