The Stormers may lose, but they won't choke

DHL Stormers coach John Dobson knows that a derby against the Vodacom Bulls is always a 50/50 game, but one thing he says he is certain of going into Saturday’s Vodacom United Rugby Championship final at DHL Stadium is that his team won’t choke.

During the years of Super Rugby, there was no South African team that lost more home play-off games than the Stormers. Indeed, there was no team in the competition that lost more home knockout fixtures than the Stormers did in the 26 years that South Africa was part of the southern hemisphere regional competition.

It started in 1999, in the famous Men in Black year when the team coached by Alan Solomons and captained by first Bob Skinstad and then Corne Krige captured the hearts of Capetonians with a vibrant, all-action attacking style that brought nearly capacity crowds to Newlands on several consecutive weekends. It was enough to set them up as favourites for their semifinal against the Highlanders, but they lost.

There have been several occasions subsequent to that where they have lost in a play-off fixture, and their only notable home playoff win was the 2010 decimation of the Waratahs that sent them into the Orlando Stadium final against the Bulls. That remains their only appearance in a final in an inter-continental competition.

The teams that came to Newlands to win playoff games, two of them semifinals but also a series of quarterfinals, were Crusaders, the Chiefs twice, the Brumbies and, in 2012 when like this year they’d finished second on the log, the Sharks. The ignominious aspect of that game was that the Sharks had travelled from Brisbane, where they’d won a quarterfinal against the Reds, one of just two overseas playoff games ever won by a South African team.

DOBSON'S PROMISE TO CAPE FANS

But while it is almost inevitable that the dreaded ‘C’ word would hover over Saturday’s massive occasion for the Stormers as they host the inaugural URC final, Dobson is adamant that it won’t happen this time. While he says the games between his team and the Bulls are always too tight to call, he says a defeat won’t be down to his team bottling under pressure.

“The games we played against the Bulls this year were close. When we last played them here at the DHL Stadium we won 19-17, and after our win at Loftus earlier in the season we read that we had burgled it,” said Dobson.

“The whole South African conference battle was tight and there was not much to choose between the teams. It went down to the last minutes of the final game of the league phase, when we scored a last gasp try to win at Parc Y Scarlets. Yes, we’ve beaten the Bulls two times in a row, but before that we’d had two or three losses in a row to them. This will be a classic derby, we are starting out from scratch and the recent history has nothing to do with it.

“But what I do absolutely guarantee is that we won’t choke. There will be no question of that. We will put everything out there, like we have in every game we have played this season. We have turned up in every game we played, even in that horrible loss to the Lions here in December we had much of the game, we couldn’t be faulted for effort.”

Dobson is right about that. There hasn’t been a game where the Stormers have been blown away, and even right at the start of the competition, when every South African team was struggling overseas, the Stormers were more competitive than their countrymen, and led Munster at halftime in their second game in Limerick.

Perhaps the worst hour of rugby produced by the Stormers this season was against the Cell C Sharks in Durban, but that they found a way to come back from a 15-point deficit there to draw the game. Which might be something that distinguishes this Stormers team from previous ones.

REFUSAL TO ACCEPT DEFEAT

Their simple refusal to die, to accept defeat, and if there is one thing that should worry the Bulls ahead of the final it is not the way the Stormers played the game against Ulster last week, but the way they won it. Winning at the death like that, and it wasn’t the first time it has happened this year, is a testament to both temperament and character.

Dobson never mentioned it, but it is also true that if there was any ghost from past chokes hanging over the Stormers, they’ve obliterated it over the past two weekends. They’ve played a home quarterfinal and won, they’ve played a semifinal and won.

Yes, they did show signs of panic against Ulster, and there were probably many Stormers fans who during the third quarter of that game their team’s season was done. Flyhalf Manie Libbok played his worst game in the semifinal since the aforementioned Durban game against the Sharks and there are question marks hanging over the No10 heading into the final. He is more flashy, more talented and produces more individual brilliance, but his opposite number Chris Smith does do the basics better, as of course does the Bulls’ replacement flyhalf Morne Steyn.

But in helping set up the equalising try and then kicking the high-pressure match-winning conversion, Libbok might have achieved a breakthrough when it comes to confidence of the handling the pressure of a playoff game. And the same goes for the Stormers.

In many ways a semifinal is the toughest playoff game. Even if you lose in a final, you can say it was an achievement to get there, and people do remember the losing finalist. They don’t remember who loses in a semifinal. In short, the Stormers may already have conquered their demons.