Next few rounds decisive as Stormers strengthen position

A day where the DHL Stormers cooked in the lunch-time humidity and the Cell C Sharks were lucky to only lose by 27 has pretty much turned the remainder of the Vodacom United Rugby Championship into a two horse race when it comes to the South African Shield.

It is debatable whether the Sharks still had pretensions of ending as the top local team even before they were put to the sword by Deon Fourie’s Stormers. For them, the task of just ensuring they finish in the top eight and therefore being part of next year’s Heineken Champions Cup, a competition they have said they desperately want to win, was uppermost given how far they were behind the Stormers and Bulls.

If that was indeed a choice made by the Sharks, it is no longer a choice. They are now even further behind the leaders, with the Stormers having hit the 50 mark in log points with five games to go. The Sharks still have a game in hand on both the Stormers and the Bulls, but with the Cape side ahead by 17 points, that is just too much for the six games that the Durbanites have remaining. For the Sharks it really is now just about making sure of their top eight spot - actually it is more complicated than that - by winning enough of their remaining games.

Why it’s complicated is because while top eight gets you a play-off spot in the competition, Heineken Cup qualification requires a team to be among the next four behind the four Shield winners. All the Welsh teams are outside of the top eight currently, so it looks like it will be a repeat of last year, with the eighth placed team having to give up on Europe in favour of whoever wins the Welsh conference.

SHARKS BARELY HANGING IN

As the log stands, if it ended right now the conference winners would be Leinster (Ireland), the Stormers (South Africa), Glasgow (Scotland/Italy), and Cardiff, who are currently 11th. The Sharks, currently eighth, would play the URC knock-outs but miss out on the 2023/24 Heineken Cup.

A glance at the log shows that the Sharks have some important games in their future, and they should be pleased that they still have to face the two teams immediately above them, Benetton and Munster, at HollywoodBets Kings Park. In that sense, their destiny is in their own hands.

But the Sharks can also do the Stormers and to a lesser extent the Bulls when they face Ulster in the fixture rearranged by the tummy bug the Belfast based team suffered when they visited Durban in October on 25 January. For after their good win in Durban, the Stormers should be focussed primarily now on the second spot overall that will ensure home ground advantage until semifinal stage should they get that far.

Currently Ulster are seven points behind the Stormers in third place and three ahead of the Bulls, but they have a game in hand on both South African teams. That’s why a Sharks win against them will be so helpful.

ULSTER HAVE A FEW OBSTACLES TOO

Not that the Sharks are the only obstacle for Ulster this month. The next URC game is at The Scotstoun in Glasgow on Friday, 17 February, and it features the hosts, Glasgow Warriors, against the Ulstermen. Franco Smith’s team is on a roll at present and even without a clutch of Scotland internationals they will have a good chance of winning.

That weekend is going to be a key one when it comes to log positions, and the Bulls’ home derby against the Stormers pretty much amounts to a last chance saloon. The Stormers have a 10 point advantage, and there won’t be enough games left in the season after that (just four) for the Bulls to have a realistic chance of making up that gap.

Of course, it goes without saying that a win at Loftus will significantly strengthen the Stormers’ chances of second spot overall too. So it will be a big weekend, not least for the Sharks, who have some improving to do when they head to Johannesburg to face the Emirates Lions.

The Sharks do have quite a bit of thinking to do, for while the commentators did make quite a bit of the fact they were without their Springboks, that can’t be used as an excuse given it was a home game and that the Stormers were also without key Boks and a few other injured players. Indeed, an indication of just how much John Dobson has grown the Stormers’ depth can be gleaned from the fact that skipper Deon Fourie was the only Stormers forward at Kings Park who played in last year’s URC final.

The players the Stormers were missing include skipper Steven Kitshoff, Frans Malherbe, Marvin Orie, the injured Salmaan Moerat who would have been a rested Bok were he fit, Damian Willemse and another injured Bok in Evan Roos. Hacjivah Dayimani, so often the Stormers’ MVP, also wasn’t in Durban, and neither was Leolin Zas. All of those were key players when the Stormers won the trophy last year.

STORMERS LOCK CRISIS IN NO LONGER A CRISIS

A combination of good coaching and clever recruitment has given the Stormers the ability to cover the absentees, with the acquisition of former Sharks lock Ruben van Heerden in particular a masterstroke on the Stormers’ part. With Gary Porter, an unknown that Dobson remembered from his Varsity Cup days and plucked out of the obscurity of lower division rugby in the UK, has proved an even more inspired choice given that his name wasn’t as known as Van Heerden, and with Ernst van Rhyn, another top player missing in Durban, expected to be fit again for the Bulls game, suddenly the Stormers’ lock crisis is looking anything but that. And particularly not if you consider the growth of the likes of Ben-Jason Dixon and Connor Evans when given their opportunities.

It is possible for big money to buy success so the creaks in the Sharks system are not exposed so much when the Boks are present, but even then the recent Champions Cup game against Harlequins at The Stoop, when the Boks did play, exposed cracks as it was a day when the Sharks were out-coached as much as anything else.

And when it comes to the level of organisation that comes about from good coaching, there was a yawning chasm between the teams in this latest game.

Recruitment has long been an issue at the Sharks and if there was something for their supporters to ponder after the big defeat to their coastal rivals it was whether it should really have been head coach Sean Everitt who was shown the door after the big defeat to Cardiff in November. The people in charge of recruitment might be more culpable when it comes to the Sharks’ inconsistency.

Weekend Vodacom United Rugby Championship result

Cell C Sharks 19 DHL Stormers 46

Log positions

1. Leinster 61 points after 13 games

2. DHL Stormers 50 points after 13 games

3. Ulster 43 points after 12 games

4. Vodacom Bulls 40 points after 13 games

5. Glasgow Warriors 39 points after 12 games

6. Munster 37 points after 13 games

7. Benetton 34 points after 13 games

8. Cell C Sharks 33 points after 12 games

9. Edinburgh 31 points after 13 games

10. Connacht 30 points after 13 games

11. Cardiff 29 points after 13 games

12. Ospreys 29 points after 13 games

13. Emirates Lions 24 points after 12 games

14. Scarlets 22 points after 13 games

15. Dragons 18 points after 13 games

16. Zebre 7 points after 13 games

Next Vodacom URC fixtures

Glasgow Warriors v Ulster (17 February, 21.35)

Munster v Ospreys (17 February, 21.35)

Emirates Lions v Cell C Sharks (18 February, 15.00)

Vodacom Bulls v DHL Stormers (18 February, 17.05)

Zebre v Connacht (18 February, 17.05)

Cardiff Rugby v Benetton (18 February, 19.15)

Scarlets v Edinburgh (18 February, 19.15)

Leinster v Dragons (18 February, 21.35)