It says something about the commitment, passion and quality of the DHL Stormers’ effort in Friday night’s opening game of the Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry tour that All Black coach Dave Rennie found reason to praise his team’s character afterwards.
What? They were playing against a team without 10 Springboks and other injured players that was just three week’s into their pre-season. You’d have expected it to be the other way around, with Stormers coach John Dobson praising his players for just getting through the game.
But that wasn’t the case. The Stormers did ask the All Blacks serious questions, and to be truthful they didn’t answer them well. The four tries the All Blacks scored in the last 12 minutes to conflate what had always been a close game to a 38-21 win skewed the reality - the All Black team that played at the DHL Stadium was suspect in the scrums, vulnerable when the Stormers mauled them, at times a little passive on defence, and when they had ball in hand didn’t always look as composed in the face of a proper press defence as their first choice team was in the recent test match against Ireland.
That’s also not to mention the recurrence of the All Black vulnerability to any kind of aerial assault, something that they don’t practice as there is little of that in Super Rugby, where passive defences also allow a lot of impressive running rugby that may really prove to be a mirage once they confront teams with more aggressive line-speed.
DISCIPLINE WAS POOR
The Kiwi discipline was also all over the place, with three players receiving yellow cards over the 80 minutes, as well as conceding a penalty try. They also conceded a phenomenal 16 penalties. So yes, the All Blacks were most definitely subjected to a test of character, and Rennie was right to make that his focus afterwards as there wasn’t much else to enthuse over.
“It was a good introduction for us to South African rugby and a proud province,” he said.
“It felt like whichever team had the ball got rewarded by the referee. We gave away a number of scrum penalties and they were able to piggyback off that, and then a handful of more penalties and then obviously those yellow cards. For us to give away as many penalties as we did and go into halftime in front highlights a lot of character shown under a lot of pressure.”
That is true, but imagine what might have happened if the Stormers were anywhere near full strength. They were missing Boks like Damian Willemse, Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, Cobus Reinach, Ben-Jason Dixon, Paul de Villiers and Zachary Porthen from the team that played last season, while additional Boks in Siya Kolisi, Wilco Louw and Cheslin Kolbe are now contracted to them.
So the game wasn’t a measure, as some might want to couch it, of the strength of South African club rugby. The Stormers were seriously under-strength, and were also missing the likes of JD Schickerling, who makes an immense difference to their pack when he is present, Marcel Theunissen and Jurie Matthee. The players who stepped into the breach were magnificent, but the fact the teams were level 14-all with 12 minutes to go ought to have been a wakeup call to the All Blacks.
STORMERS COMBATIVENESS WOULD HAVE HELPED VISITORS PREPARE
It would have been, and that’s the point, and probably Rennie’s point too - out of these tour games his team will learn, and it might just prepare them well for what they will face in the first test of the series in Johannesburg on 22 August. Rennie admitted a lot of improvement will be necessary before then.
“We knew they’d come at us with their set piece, so we’ve got to be better in those areas. We expected a lot of areiral attacks, and again we didn’t deal with that as well as we would have wanted to,” said the All Black coach.
He did, though, retain faith in his plan.
“We showed heaps of character, we are very well conditioned, and we felt that if we could hang onto the ball we could eventually find space and hurt them. We were very clinical late in the game.”
CLINICAL AGAINST A TEAM OUT ON ITS FEET
Indeed, that will be the All Black plan against the Boks, and they were clinical against the Stormers in those last 12 minutes. But the Stormers are three weeks into a pre-season and were understandably out on their feet towards the end. The Boks are completely in season and having had more regular competition with the All Blacks than the Stormers players have will also be more used to the pace that the Kiwis bring to the game.
Not that comparing this All Black team with the one coached by Scott Robertson is necessarily comparing apples with apples - the All Blacks have significantly upped their passes and attacking rucks. The forthcoming series is going to be a clash of styles and it’d be fair to say that the All Black team that played on Friday night fell some way short of making an emphatic statement in that regard.