Red card curveball against Bristol might benefit Stormers

In these modern times when the technicalities around tackle height and other aspects of the game that could contribute to players being banished from the field are so strict you never know when an untimely card might scupper the best laid plans. It happened to the DHL Stormers at the weekend, but it might turn out it was good timing.

When Bristol Bears pitched up at the DHL Stadium with what their coach Pat Lam described as the youngest team he’d ever selected in his time with the English club, it was clear that the Stormers were always going to win their opening Investec Champions Cup pool fixture, with the only real question hovering over their chase for an important try scoring bonus point.

And even that became inevitable when it became clear the Stormers scrum, as usually expected even when as on this occasion the front row has been rotated, was going to be dominant. That narrative was set in the early minutes, and Stormers director of rugby John Dobson appeared to agree that was inevitable to this writer had quickly become inevitable to the players too.

“We were a little flat with our energy in the first half and maybe we thought it was just going to come too easily (when we’d established our scrum dominance),” said Dobson afterwards.

The curveball for the Stormers came in the form of the red card that was rightly shown to starting hooker JJ Kotze just beyond the half hour mark when he got his tackle height wrong in trying to defend the Stormers’ line. The red meant that they’d be down to 14 men for 20 minutes, and that became 13 men when wing Leolin Zas was pinged for a tackle height infringement that was much more debatable early in the second half.

It meant the Stormers had to resort to game management to get through that period relatively unscathed. They didn’t manage it completely, for Bristol did come back from 21-7 to 21-12 at one point, with the Stormers quickly restored their lead when Jonathan Roche scored a try that exploited a Bristol mistake on the touchline.

But generally they coped well, and in the end Dobson might be happy to trade the bigger win that would probably have materialised had his team been at 15 all through the game with the experience of having to box clever. The Stormers could get away with it against Bristol, and maybe much less so against a different team and in a bigger game, but they should nonetheless be better versed now on how to deal with that kind of situation.

“We had to spend 25 to 26 minutes of this game on game management, which took some fun out of it. So we credit Paul (de Villiers) and the rest of the leadership for the way they got us going.”

De Villiers was the starting skipper in the game because of the calf problem that forced regular captain Ruhan Nel to withdraw on the morning of the game, with Wandisile Simelane coming in at outside centre as his replacement.

The 23-year-old Springbok flanker acquitted himself well as the captain, and of course he has plenty of experience in that role after captaining the Junior Springboks and there is a chance he may get another chance to do so as while Dobson is hopeful Nel will be back for this weekend’s Vodacom URC game against the Scarlets, he doesn’t seem completely sure of that.

“Hopefully it is just a week (that Ruhan is absent) but we will have to be conservative as it is the kind of injury that can turn into three or four months out if it is not managed correctly,” said Dobson.

The Stormers have two home URC games to look forward to against Scarlets and then Ulster in successive weeks before the November international break. They will be looking for full points from both games so they can take a strong platform of success into the restart in December, when they are due to travel to Durban for the return URC derby against the Sharks on 5 December before travelling to Bordeaux to face Champions Cup champions Bordeaux-Begles in their second match in the elite European competition. Thereafter comes the home URC derby against the 10Bet Lions before a two week gap over the festive period leads into the plum home derby against the Vodacom Bulls on 3 January.