Between Christmas and New Year’s, the DHL Stormers defeated the Hollywoodbets Sharks, but this week they will have to defend their DHL Stadium stronghold against the English Sale Sharks, another kind of shark.
The Stormers will be playing their second home Investec Champions Cup match, but their first in Cape Town because the first one was played in Gqeberha.
They are feeling less pressure because they have little chance of making it to the round of 16 after losing to Toulon at home and Harlequins away.
John Dobson, the coach of the Stormers, is aware that if his side wins their final two games, they still have a chance to advance because the other teams in their group will be playing each other over the coming weeks. Their next opponent is Racing 92, who they will go to France to play.
Given that a lot has changed since their last Champions Cup match, in which Harlequins essentially outplayed a second or third string combination at the Twickenham Stoop, it could be set up for a strong Stormers challenge for the round of 16 spot they have earned in their two prior campaigns.
Not only have influential players like Deon Fourie come back into the system after recovering from injury, they could also have Evan Roos and Sti Sithole available for this weekend.
But more than that, they were the big local winners over the two weekends of URC derbies, winning both games against the Emirates Lions and the South African version of the Sharks with full points.
That has relieved much of the pressure that was hanging over them and Dobson is no longer working on the Champions Cup preparations with one eye on what is to come next in the URC.
What is to come next is in fact a trip to Leinster on 25 January, but that works perfectly for the Stormers in the sense that it should mean that there is less of a logistical challenge around that game and the Champions Cup clash the previous weekend with Racing 92.
“It does fall quite nicely for us in that we can treat the trip to Paris and then Dublin as a proper tour and, depending on what happens against Sale, we can go into both games at full strength,” said Dobson after his team beat the Durbanites at DHL Stadium just before New Year.
Why going into the Paris game full strength depends on the Sale Sharks result is because a defeat in Cape Town on Saturday will effectively put the Stormers out of Champions Cup contention.
There’d then be little point in going Full Metal Jacket, as Dobson would put it, against Racing 92, and it would make more sense to select with the following week’s game in Dublin in mind.
But Dobson is hoping the Champions Cup challenge will still be on when his team flies out to Paris next week and his intention is to go for broke against Sale.
We know how hard it is now for us to advance to the knock-outs of the Champions Cup and the home defeat to Toulon really hurt us,” said the Stormers coach.
“But we have achieved our mission of getting full points from our last two URC games and feel we are now in a position to give the Sale game a good shot. We will give it a full go and If we get full points from it, then we have something to play for when we go to France and we can build from that into our next big URC game against Leinster.
We will go full strength against Leinster regardless of what happens and regardless of what team they select. Going to Dublin with the intention of winning will be a nice challenge for us and there is an opportunity as the Six Nations starts the following week and Leinster would have just come off two hard Champions Cup games.”
Indeed, Leinster face a repeat of the 2021/2022 and 2022/2023 Champions Cup finals when they play against La Rochelle this coming weekend and there is an intense rivalry between the two teams because of the history. And Dobson is right with what he is implying when he talks of opportunity – Leinster have two thirds of the Ireland starting team playing for them and the national team will either be in a pre Six Nations camp on the weekend of the Stormers game or at the very least have their minds switching to that competition.
Neither of the two derby wins were achieved without blemish but then that is maybe a good thing – the Stormers won comfortably against a Lions team that had pretensions of a top four finish before they visited Cape Town and while the Sharks had injury problems and hung in to the last minutes, the Stormers were still comprehensively better than the Durban side and should have scored more than their four tries. That on a day when they made a lot of errors.
“We feel that we are on the right track now and aspects of our game that we have been working on are coming through to good effect. That we won these games with room for improvement is promising.” The Stormers team for the Sale clash will be announced on Friday.
