I was perplexed at the surrender from the Stormers in Glasgow on Friday night. I know the team well enough to know that missing 40 tackles is not in their DNA.
Yesterday morning, I was even more perplexed, having forced myself to watch the match again.
Stormers coach John Dobson and the ownership will be ensuring a similar pause on the flight home to Cape Town. The post-mortem of the season will be very different to the post-mortem of a limp defensive surrender to the defending champions in Glasgow.
The Stormers had fought so gallantly to finish the season fifth. They’d overcome injuries, retirements, suspensions and the loss of many of their frontline Springboks during the season. But the one thing they never had to overcome was a desire to fight, to tackle and be in the contest until the final whistle. It is what defines a team that has won a final, lost a final and always made it to the play-offs, finishing no lower than fifth in the league.
On Friday night in Glasgow, there simply was none of that defensive mongrel in making one-on-one tackles, and there was none of their physicality in the collisions. There was only ever one winner, and it was not the visitors from Cape Town.
Defensively demonic
Glasgow were good. They were tight as a unit, powerful in attack and defensively demonic in how they neutralised lengthy periods of Stormers attacks.
Take nothing away from the hosts. They brought the heat and the Stormers defensively could not match the intensity or the physicality.
Glasgow’s flyhalf Tom Jordan looked like Jonah Lomu on the charge and the Stormers defensively doubled as traffic controllers and showed him the green light.
If you are from Cape Town and you support the Stormers, it was an awfully painful way to spend your Friday night.
The Stormers defensively disintegrated and in the final 30 minutes the attacking lineout suffered a similar collapse.
Disinterest in tackles
The coaching staff will own their decisions, from selection to substitutions, to the week’s preparation, but I don’t know if they will have an answer to a performance so uncharacteristic and marked by seeming disinterest in making one-on-one tackles.
The post-mortem will be on leadership, preparation and belief. How did a team built to defend fold so feebly in those one-on-one moments?
These are questions that can only be answered from within the squad, and it will be a long time between play-off drinks to show there are answers to the failed examination of Friday night.
In any wreckage there’s always hope and perhaps the Stormers, as a unit, can learn from the story of Champions Cup winners Bordeaux, who a season ago lost the Top 14 final 59-3 to Toulouse, the same team they would beat in this season’s Champions Cup semifinal.
All humiliated together
The Bordeaux players were shattered and shamed. This is how their owner addressed them in the sanctuary of their change-room, courtesy of @rugbyvous.
“We can’t change the conversation today because we were all humiliated together and in humiliation there is also inspiration to be found. But this I can say to you boys, like I said yesterday: Thank you to the staff, players, to those that are leaving. But UBB’s story is not just today.
“During 17 years, this club has gone through indescribable moments. Our backs were against the wall, and I never thought we would get out of it. But here we are in a final. We were humiliated and we will take that on.
“There will be people who say we are not good enough to be in a final, but we will come back and we will win the Top 14 and Champions Cup. This is not going to beat us or bring us down. We lost the final together, but we will stay strong together and we will bounce back together. Thank you.”
Ditto the Stormers.
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