Neither team has been announced yet and both will be later on Friday but if you look at the potential Vodacom Bulls team that can be assembled for Saturday’s Vodacom URC derby it is easy to see why they are the clear favourites to beat the DHL Stormers at Loftus.
Bulls coach Johan Ackermann has some tricky but enviable selection dilemmas to consider. For instance Harold Vorster was excellent last time out against the Hollywoodbets Sharks but Jan Serfontein has made his way back from injury and took part in the friendly against Boland the week before the Sharks visited Pretoria.
There are other Springboks such as Gerhard Steenekamp and Johan Grobbelaar back in the selection mix this week and if the Bulls go full strength, which surely they should, then they have a formidable, international strength side on paper. They also boast form, having not lost since they went down to the Stormers in the first round derby in Cape Town in January and in their last two games they have gathered impressive momentum.
INJURIES AND FORM HAVE DERAILED VISITORS
By contrast, the Stormers have lost four of the five matches they’ve played since they beat the Bulls 13-8 with a late maul try at the DHL Stadium and after their rollicking start to the season are now floundering. Add to that some seemingly minor and yet very significant injury interventions, meaning at lock, where the Stormers don’t have either Salmaan Moerat or Ruben van Heerden available.
That means they don’t for now boast the strength in depth in that position that made their version of the ‘Bomb Squad’ so instrumental in the more significant victories they scored in their impressive 10 match winning run that included wins overseas against Munster, Benetton and Bayonne where there were noticeable gear shifts in the second half.
Indeed, if you watched just the Stormers games they’ve played this year, meaning the six starting with that tight derby win in Cape Town, you’d perhaps find the current Stormers unrecognisable from the side that was so imperious in September through to midway through December, with mid-December being the point they appeared to start drifting away from their previous template.
The Stormers haven’t been playing well and as Stormers stalwart tighthead prop Neethling Fouche so colourfully put it this week, if his grandmother, who must have been a hard taskmaster and a perfectionist, were still alive, she’d be tearing strips off him for how the Stormers have played over the past two months.
NORTH/SOUTH IS A DIFFERENT LEVEL DERBY TO THE OTHERS
And yet, for all of those very good reasons why the Bulls shouldn’t just win but win comfortably, don’t bet your house on it if you are a betting person. South African derbies are notoriously difficult to predict, as evidenced by the Lions winning the local Shield and the Sharks, underdogs in both games against the Stormers, winning the coastal derbies.
But the big north/south game is even more difficult to predict, and for evidence of why I say that look at the record between the two sides in the URC era - the Bulls have just beaten the Stormers twice. In addition to the league wins, the Stormers also won two play-off games (the 2022 final and the 2023 quarterfinal), so it’s currently 9 wins to the Stormers and just two to the Bulls.
The DHL Stormers head to Loftus this weekend with the upper hand across their last three #VURC meetings 👀 pic.twitter.com/BkVPR3ad0Y
— SuperSport Rugby (@SSRugby) March 10, 2026
Who was it that said that the one thing that man has learnt from history is that man doesn’t learn from history? Well, history does mean something, and even in Pretoria the history is against the Bulls - they’ve won just once against their arch-rivals in four starts.
A historic trend that has been built up has to be there for a reason, and in the case of the north/south derby it is because it quite literally is a level different, and it is approached differently, to other games. Yes, the Sharks marketing people always make a big deal of a game against the Bulls as if it is THE big game of the season, but it’s nonsense and you just need to look at the crowd attendances for Stormers/Bulls games to see why I say that.
That’s not to say there’s no special derby atmosphere when the Sharks play the Bulls or for that matter the Stormers, it is just that it isn’t at quite the same level and doesn’t have quite the same storied history as Stormers/Bulls (Western Province/Northern Transvaal).
“PRIVILEGE TO PLAY IN THESE GAMES”
Maybe Fouche gave away why it is different when he said “We all view it as a privilege to play in this game” and “We only get so many opportunities to play in a big north/south derby in our careers”. The Bulls’ Marcell Coetzee said exactly the same thing, and added that the Bulls always get up against the Stormers. As indeed they did in their narrow loss in Cape Town, when the Bulls were on a losing run and considered to be in disarray and yet the scores were level until two minutes to go.
That’s it in a nutshell. It’s just a different game, it brings out a different beast in the protagonists, and a year ago the Bulls were also strong favourites and yet it was the Stormers’ second choice flyhalf Jurie Matthee who emerged as the man of the match in a tight win.
Don’t misunderstand what is being said, the Bulls do merit being strong favourites. But the form book is not always a reliable guide when it comes to north/south games, and it was indeed at Loftus, in a game where they were rank underdogs, that the Stormers started their drive to the inaugural URC title in 2022. There was agreement afterwards that it was the confidence gained from winning at Loftus that galvanised what until then had been a mediocre season.
The Stormers look down on confidence and have been very error-ridden in their last few matches but were completely dominant in the second half against the Lions, where the hosts kept them tantalisingly at arms length on several occasions when the Cape side looked sure to score. If they start like they finished in Johannesburg and can bury the white line fever it will be a competitive game.
This is catch up week in the URC, meaning that the Pretoria derby is being played now after being postponed from it’s initial date in the week between Christmas and New Year, and two games that were postponed because of a northern hemisphere storm in week two of the competition are also being played this weekend, both on Friday night.
Weekend Vodacom URC matches
Week 2 of 18 (postponed due to northern hemisphere storm)
Edinburgh v Ulster (Edinburgh, Friday 21:45)
Prediction: Edinburgh to win by less than 7
Connacht v Scarlets (Galway, Friday 21:45)
Prediction: Connacht to win by 8
Week 8 of 18 (fixture shifted due to reluctance to play Christmas week)
Vodacom Bulls v DHL Stormers (Pretoria, Saturday 14:00)
Prediction: Bulls to win by 7 or less