One thing you definitely won’t hear debated in the buildup week to their first Vodacom United Rugby Championship home game against Munster is whether the DHL Stormers might be complacent.
History reflects that the Irish visitors to the DHL Stadium are the one team that can be considered a proper bogey team for the Stormers. In the sense that they have yet to win against the 2022/2023 champions - anywhere.
“I think I have played against them five times now and have never beaten them,” said wing Leolin Zas as the Stormers continued preparations for a game that has added pressure following last weekend’s sobering 38-7 defeat at the hands of Edinburgh at The Hive.
However, that doesn’t mean the home team is daunted by the prospect of playing the team that narrowly beat them in the 2022/2023 final in Cape Town, just a few weeks after the Stormers had suffered a league defeat to Graham Rowntree’s men at the same venue.
“We don’t live in the past, we are focusing on Saturday and just looking at getting right the things we got wrong against Edinburgh,” said the Stormers wing.
“That is our main focus. It wasn’t a good performance or result against Edinburgh, but maybe some of the things that happened in that game needed to happen to get us up for this game against Munster.”
STORMERS WILL RESPECT POSSESSION MORE
That should probably be translated into saying that the Stormers will be a bit tighter on the ball and respect their possession more, like they did at stages of the second quarter where only refereeing error and bad luck denied them, but it does not mean that the Stormers are throwing the baby out with the dishwater and reinventing themselves.
“We have been here before a few times in the last few seasons, and we have come back well both times we have started the competition poorly,” reflected Zas.
“Even though we didn’t win our last game on tour, we know why. The coaches won’t be taking the freedoms we players have, we know what our strengths are and we know what to work on. We will stick to our guns and do what we do. We can’t blame last week’s defeat on something specific, it is what we’ve gone through in the reviews.
“We will stick to our guns and continue to do what we do. It was only the third game of the season. We just have to have patience, we know what we are working on will come,” he added.
What Zas said was in accord with the view of the Stormers’ attack coach, Dawie Snyman, who backed up the player’s claim that there wouldn’t be a big departure from the set plan due to the unexpectedly chastening defeat in Edinburgh.
“We won’t change a lot, we just want to execute better, which was something we didn’t do well on tour,” said Snyman.
“We are an ambitious side and want to play a certain style of rugby, getting players like Leolin in space and creating one-on-one opportunities for them. It’s about getting the balance right, knowing when to pull the trigger, when to keep the ball alive and when to get go-forward.
“We made those mistakes against Edinburgh because we were in the mindset of turning the game and didn’t look for other ways to turn it. That was the big learning from those last 20 minutes, finding different ways to get momentum.”
LEARNING FROM EVERY GAME
Snyman said that although the Stormers have yet to beat Munster in the URC, they’ve learned more about their opponents every time they’ve played them.
“Munster are a very efficient side that has a lot of world class players in different positions. They are a tough team to break down, but we’ve come close. We have learned something from every game we have played against them.”
One player that Munster won’t have in their team on Saturday who has been a big thorn in the Stormers side in the past is Springbok lock RG Snyman, who has moved to Leinster. However, Munster do have former Stormers lock and another 2023 Rugby World Cup winner Jean Kleyn back playing again.
Munster will be in as desperate a mood to win as the Stormers will as, like the Cape side, they’ve also suffered two defeats in the early stages of the new URC season - one of them to lowly Zebre, the big shock result of the competition so far, and the other to log leaders Leinster.