It doesn’t take long for the purple prose praising the DHL Stormers in the Western Cape to go in the opposite direction and become acerbic, so it was understandable that coach John Dobson should emphasise his feeling of relief after his team’s solid win over Munster.
After the 38-7 defeat in Edinburgh the previous weekend had attracted the brickbats, it increased the pressure on the Stormers to do what they had yet to do in the Vodacom United Rugby Championship by beating a Munster team that travelled to Cape Town to take the URC title off them two seasons ago.
Triumph at the DHL Stadium is not an alien feeling for Munster, for they also won a league game there in the year they won the URC, but they didn’t get it right this time against a Stormers team that just didn’t let them.
There was still the flash that the Stormers will always have because that is their strength and what makes them dangerous, but there was also a much greater measure of the control they showed in their previous victory against Zebre in Parma.
That the Stormers felt they had a point to prove was underlined in the post-match television interview with skipper Dan du Plessis, who said “We proved a few people wrong.”
If there were people who doubted that the Stormers had the credentials to challenge for the top four place they narrowly missed out on last season, and for the first time in their URC history, they were indeed proved wrong.
A VERY TOUGH WEEK
With the Sharks stronger this year, and the Lions too, plus a few other teams making key improvements, it will be more of a bunfight than it has been previously. But the Stormers, on the evidence of their 34-19 win over their nemesis, showed that rumours of their imminent demise may have been grossly exaggerated.
For Dobson, it was a performance that gave him some much needed breathing space, something he will hope to get more of by beating the Glasgow Warriors when they visit Danie Craven Stadium in Stellenbosch this weekend (the game is being played there to avoid an apparent clash with a country music festival at DHL Stadium).
“The feeling is pure relief, this was a very tough week,” said Dobson at the post-match press conference.
“For me, the record against Munster wasn’t in itself a massive thing. If we had another loss, it could have done more damage. Last year, we felt massive pressure after a tour where we lost all four games. There was a kind of knife to our throat feeling for the rest of the season, in the sense we couldn’t afford to lose again.
“If we had lost tonight we would have been there again, on the dust road. We have another one to do next week, and if we win then, we will be in a really good spot,” he added.
RELIEF WHILE LOOKING AHEAD
The Stormers are only 12th on the log, and the win lifted them from last (16th), but there is a distortion to the table from a South African perspective because they have played a game less than the other teams due to the postponement of the scheduled first round derbies on 21 September, which clashed with Carling Currie Cup final day.
Dobson was relieved, but he also felt there was a lot his team still needs to work on as they head into their fifth game of the season against the competition champions, who will be smarting after being defeated by the Sharks at the weekend.
“Munster are a really good team and a much tougher team than we sometimes realise, but I don’t think we were that compelling,” he said.
“There were some obvious things that weren’t right. We had the top lineout in the competition before tonight, but we lost five or six. We also gave away too many penalties in the middle of the field to give Munster easy access to our 22 metre area.” The easy Munster access to the red zone was made less impactful though to the Stormers by their excellent defence.
“I thought our defence was magnificent. Munster needed us to give away penalties to get their entries. So I thought this was a good defensive effort from a team fighting for a win.”
Damian Willemse excelled at flyhalf for the Stormers and walked away with the official man of the match award but with Manie Libbok likely to be back in the selection mix this week, and he must play after his five star for the Springboks in Mbombela the last time he played, it will be interesting to see what position he plays in Stellenbosch.
We might well see the skipper Du Plessis, who has been outstanding in all the games he has played, sitting this one out to allow Willemse to slot in alongside Libbok in the No 12 jersey, in which case the captaincy reins might switch to one of the two tightheads, the returning Bok Frans Malherbe or Neethling Fouche.