Rare clash serves good purpose for Kings and Stormers

Isuzu Southern Kings head coach Robbi Kempson believes Friday night’s friendly derby against the DHL Stormers in Knysna will be an important stepping stone to the second half of his team’s PRO14 Rugby campaign.

The two franchises clash in what for one team is a pre-season warm-up and another is a mid-season experimentation and development opportunity at Loerie Park in the Garden Route town on Friday night (kick-off 19h00). For the Kings it will be a chance to tune up for the following week’s important PRO14 derby against the Toyota Cheetahs in Port Elizabeth, while the Stormers will be testing their depth ahead of the Vodacom Super Rugby season that starts two weeks later.

The Kings recently returned from a five week hiatus over the festive season to suffer a chastening big defeat at the hands of Edinburgh at Murrayfield.

Although well beaten in a match where at one stage they were down to 12 men, the Kings did show signs of improvement in the areas, such as attack, that they professed to be working on during their mini off-season. The Knysna game will be a good opportunity for them then to develop it further without the pressure of playing for PRO14 competition points.

“One or two of our players will be rested for the purpose of doing extra conditioning, and also having a couple of players coming back from injuries whom we will be able to utilise and see where they are at,” said Kempson.

“We’ll be taking a squad of about 26 players which will include some of our fringe players to see how they have adapted to how things have been going, and to see if they can make the step up should there be a need due to injury later in the PRO14 campaign. So, this will be a great opportunity to give peripheral players a good run.”

The Stormers will be playing two matches in three days this weekend as they are also involved in the Super Hero Sunday extravaganza at FNB Stadium near Soweto on Sunday. That means the Western Cape franchise will be short of full-strength as their coach John Dobson has said that he will be playing a stronger team against the Sharks in the Sunday game.

However, given that Dobson has also stated an intention to give some of his Boks a run in Knysna as it might be less risky than pushing them into a fast paced game on the highveld, the Stormers team should still be strong enough to give the Kings the stern examination that their coach will be hoping for.

,“Someone like (Bok prop) Frans Malherbe might not be suited to a fast paced game at altitude this soon after coming back to training and it will be less of a risk to play him in Knysna, and the same holds for some of our other senior players,” said the Stormers coach.

For Kempson, the game will also present an opportunity to experiment.

“We will make a few positional switches for some guys, an example being Bader Pretorius (usually a flyhalf) getting a go at inside centre,” he said.