Another game, another loss, and another occasion where positives were supposedly gained in defeat. Another game where the coach was able to praise his team for their fight. Perhaps that is the DHL Stormers’ problem. They need to say the words: “This just isn’t good enough!”
It certainly should have been said the previous week. After the one point defeat to the Vodacom Bulls, there was a lot of positivity, although admittedly it was hard to tell whether the Stormers really felt they’d somehow found momentum in defeat, or it was just the coach and captain feeding off the attitude of the assembled media.
That defeat to the Bulls, because it was at home, was a bigger drop for the Stormers than the most recent one against the Emirates Lions. Some bookies made the Lions overwhelming favourites and for good reason - an afternoon kick-off on the highveld is never easy for a coastal team.
It was always going to be a hard slog for the Stormers to get back into the game once they’d conceded 17 points in the 10 minutes that fullback Warrick Gelant was in the bin. Dobson’s talk about fighting spirit was justified insofar as it referenced the losing bonus point that could yet prove crucial.
But Dobson is also a realist and will know what matters in professional sport. It is what is in the wins and losses column. And if you put all the Stormers results in the two competitions they have played in this season together, meaning across the URC and Investec Champions Cup, you end up with a scenario that reads played 15, won 5, lost 10.
NOT MAKING THE PASS RATE
A 33 per cent success rate just doesn’t crack it and it is an indicator that while it is still possible for the Stormers to make something of this season, the Cape team have been in quite a dramatic decline since those heady days when they contested two consecutive URC finals and won the first one.
They can still make it this season because they just have to finish in the top eight to make a quarterfinal, and with two top teams likely to be in the final top four, there’s a good chance they will end up playing a playoff in South Africa. At full strength, the Stormers would have a chance of winning a one-off game in Durban or Pretoria.
But this is where an honest look at the Stormers becomes sobering. In the first two seasons of the URC they weren’t struggling to make the top eight. They were competing for a top four spot, and in the first two seasons the top two. They never made top spot in either year, but they made the final in those first two seasons because they were high enough - second in 2022 and third in 2023 - to make something of the failure of teams above them to get through the tough playoff phase.
Until last year, when they lost the quarterfinal to Glasgow Warriors at the Scotstoun, they had yet to play a playoff game away from DHL Stadium. And they’d played six of them.
FINE MARGINS HAVE GONE AGAINST THEM
This year they have suffered some bad luck - had the last gasp Manie Libbok try in Durban been allowed and Clayton Blommetjies kicked a sitter of a match winning conversion against the Bulls, the Stormers would be strong contenders for a top four place.
But that also sums up their season. It’s been about fine margins. Some of the contributing factors to those fine margins have been sporadic. The lineout went into meltdown against Racing 92, Leinster and the Bulls, but was back on point against the Lions. It has been a similar story with the scrums.
What has been a more consistent stumbling block has been their failure to protect possession and inaccuracy around the breakdowns.
“We had knocked on, broken tackles or been turned over 12 times by halftime, then came out after halftime and did two more – we just turned over too much ball,” Dobson lamented after the game and not by a long shot was it the first time he’s said that this season.
Part of that might be about having to play catch-up, which maybe in the players’ minds accentuates the need to do things quickly. And to try those 50/50 passes that sometimes work and sometimes don’t.
Jurie Matthee is a decent flyhalf if you consider that he’s probably third or fourth in line at the Stormers, but against the Lions he was again trying too hard to be the man he has replaced - Libbok. There was one pass out of the back of the hand that gave Wandisile Simelane no chance of catching it and it was in a position where a bit more patience might have got the score that would have got the Stormers back into the game.
Mention of Simelane cues another fairly consistent recent contributing factor to Stormers failure in recent times - the defending of the wide channels.
ATTACKING ETHOS KEEPS TURNSTILES TICKING
All of these are easily identifiable problems and there have been times when it looks sorted. The Stormers did look like they were building momentum in the three successive games they played from the week before Christmas to the second week of January. The whitewashing of Sale Sharks, who’d clearly come with intent in their Champions Cup pool game, was particularly impressive. It was a demonstration of how good the Stormers could be.
If you wonder why the Stormers are able to draw such big crowds to their home venue you must acknowledge that the ethos of their brand is very much in evidence when they do play at DHL Stadium. There hasn’t been a game in Cape Town this season where they haven’t scored at least four tries. The Cape fans love that. And while they have picked up a losing habit away from home, they have retained their winning habit at home, at least at DHL Stadium.
More losses like the one to the Bulls though may start attracting more detractors and hurt that support, and while injuries are certainly a big contributing factor, the Sharks did show when they went to Loftus this past weekend that you can win with a weakened team. The Sharks had far more top players missing in Pretoria than the Stormers were missing in Johannesburg.
ARRIVALS HALLS IN DURBAN AND PRETORIA ARE BUSIER
But then the Sharks have the money to buy in depth, which is also true of the Bulls. The arrivals hall at those two franchises has been far busier since the Stormers won the URC in 2022 than the Stormers arrival hall has been. Which is why judging the Stormers is so complicated - they may still be paying for the mistakes made by the bosses who were in charge during Covid times.
It shouldn’t be necessary to list the myriad of poor decisions that just dug Western Province deeper and deeper into debt because they were well documented at the time. But while I didn’t think so this time last year, one of the biggest misses might have been the decision to spurn the overtures of the American consortium that eventually went to Durban instead.
There were teething problems and growing pains, with too much meddling in the initial seasons at the Sharks by people who owned the right to make decisions but didn’t have enough feel for the sport. From my understanding, that situation has been rectified at the Sharks, the growing pains are over, and the Sharks coach has had a much bigger say in recruiting than his predecessor did.
Those teething problems in Durban may be being mirrored now at this embryonic stage of the Stormers’ relationship with their new equity partners, Red Disa. I hope I am wrong but it does feel sometimes like Dobson isn’t getting quite the same buy-in to his line of thinking when it comes to recruiting and retention that John Plumtree is in Durban these days and Jake White has always had at the Bulls.
THERE’S THE QUESTION OF MONEY
And even if he is, there’s also the question of money, which the group the Stormers spurned, meaning Marco Massotti’s MVM consortium, has far more of than anyone else. Which explains why the Sharks second string can win at Loftus, whereas when the Stormers have a few injuries expectations are lowered to the point that a narrow home defeat to the Bulls gets celebrated.
A year ago Plumtree envied the Stormers for the culture that had been developed, and all the kudos for that must go to Dobson. But now that the Sharks have started to fill in the missing part of their own jigsaw by developing the culture and also letting the coach run the recruitment they are surpassing the Stormers.
That should never be allowed to happen given where the Stormers are based. There are several big name overseas based players who had Cape Town as their first choice when thinking of returning to South Africa but ended up going elsewhere in the country where there is a bigger budget or to Japan.
Given he doesn’t have the budget at the moment, there is merit to the “plan” Dobson keeps referring to, which is the retention of prodigious young talents from the region and the quest to develop them into world beaters. For example, Suleiman Hartzenberg is going to be a much bigger name in a few seasons than he is right now, Paul de Villiers is already starting to make an impact.
However, the franchise based in Cape Town shouldn’t be a developing team. When the Stormers won the URC they created an expectation that they would kick on from there and grow to, in Dobson’s words, take their place at the top table of world rugby. Unfortunately facts are facts, and if you look at the Stormers’ performance trajectory since that win in 2022 it has been in one direction.
That may not have been the case had the Stormers done their equity deal with the big money guys who wanted to partner them in 2020.