The phrase “getting back on the horse” was given much airplay when Springbok coach Rassie Erasmus selected Manie Libbok into his starting team last week and it is one that DHL Stormers coach John Dobson should be channelling in the build-up to his team’s next game.
The Stormers always thought they might be a little underdone at the start of the South African United Rugby Championship campaign, which started a week later than the other teams because of the decision to prioritise the Carling Currie Cup final on the weekend when the URC was set to kick off with a round of derbies.
That decision arguably cost both coastal teams, with the Hollywoodbets Sharks perhaps a bit overdone after playing in a Currie Cup final and going 100 minutes in the semifinal, whereas the Stormers, who were initially planning for the final league game of the domestic competition to be the dress rehearsal warmup for the URC start, may have lacked game time.
That perhaps explains why the Stormers fell away after leading at halftime against the Ospreys, with the Ospreys continuing their recent hold on the inaugural URC champions by scoring late to deny the Stormers a losing bonus point when they had been pressing for the win with four minutes to go.
It was surely for many Stormers fans who were watching on television of the quarterfinal defeat to the Glasgow Warriors last season. That was a much closer game than the eventual margin of defeat indicated, with the visitors well in it at the Scotstoun until mistakes in the final minutes surrendered their quest for what would have been a third semifinal appearance.
Given that the Ospreys already had a URC game in them, and grew sufficiently last year to make it into the URC play-offs, the defeat shouldn’t be regarded as a train smash. What will be a train smash though is if the Stormers don’t rebound by winning against the Zebre in Parma on Saturday.
And here’s the problem, and why the Stormers can’t waste any time getting back up and riding again - Zebre produced the shock of this past weekend by beating the 2022/2023 champions Munster, and showed in that game signs of impressive growth and the potential to knock over two past champions in successive weeks.
So it is a good thing that Dobson was able to take some positive out of the opening defeat, and saw signs in the game that encouraged him and distinguished this poor start from the one to last year’s tour.
“It’s weird, because it is a similar outcome as the start of last season’s tour, but I feel better about this. A lot of the stuff we are working on was there. There were some nice performances,” said Dobson.
Given that the Stormers are starting out a game behind, whereas last year everyone was starting at the same point, that is true, although the Stormers only went on tour last year after two good wins in South Africa against the Emirates Lions in Johannesburg and the Scarlets in Stellenbosch respectively.
It was in the second half, when you’d expect being underdone to impact, that the game changed in favour of the Ospreys after the Stormers had taken the lead shortly before halftime via a penalty from flyhalf Jurie Matthee. Dobson gave praise to his opposition rather than focus too much on any failings from his team.
“Ospreys were really good in the second half. They scored off a great strike move from the lineout,” said Dobson. “But there are still some really good signs for us. We really wanted to win, so it is disappointing.”
The areas that require immediate improvement ahead of the Parma game are easy to identify.
“Our lineouts were excellent today, 100 per cent, but we lost contestable kicks and were poor in that department. With the challenges (fielding contestable kicks) in the northern hemisphere, we got absolutely hammered there, and it probably cost us the game.”