Stormers will be okay if they stop the denial

If at the start of the season DHL Stormers director of rugby John Dobson had been offered where his team is now he’d have happily bitten your hand off to get it - a place in the Investec Champions Cup playoffs, second in the Vodacom URC and just two defeats in 13 starts.

Add in the fact that they have a game in hand on the first-placed Glasgow Warriors, who are three points ahead of them, and it still looks rosy for the Stormers even though Dobson was happy to concede that the 30-19 defeat to the Hollywoodbets Sharks at the DHL Stadium was easily his most disappointing experience of the season.

But what should be disturbing for the Stormers is that for many people among the more than 52 000 at the game, including both media and no doubt many supporters, when the final whistle sounded on the first URC defeat of the season it felt like there were chickens in the night sky flapping furiously as they headed home to roost.

WRONG TO SAY NO-ONE SAW IT COMING

For it would be wrong to say that no-one saw this coming. One of the curiosities of the Stormers’ season so far is that while it was so obvious when they were overseas that the Cape side had fixed the elements of the game that saw them struggle north of the equator previously (the loss to Harlequins was with a B team so doesn’t count), if you rank the most disappointing performances of the season all of them have been at home.

They did comfortably beat La Rochelle in Gqeberha in their first home Champions Cup game, but that was a La Rochelle youth team.

And that also happened to be the game where the later Stormers deviations from their earlier script started to become apparent - while they’d played pragmatic rugby overseas and won by exercising a degree of control with both their tactical play and by outmuscling their opponents by getting the forwards to do the hard yards, against La Rochelle everything was fast and loose.

And sure enough, the mistakes came, and there was a period when the young La Rochelle team managed to get themselves back in the game. Then came a narrow win in the URC over the Lions where frankly the Stormers’ game management was frightfully poor and the looseness was very much in evidence.

They weren’t great in their narrow win over the Vodacom Bulls either although it might be wrong to suggest that was down to looseness, it was just a game where both teams were so committed, so determined, so physical that it was like watching two concrete walls smashing into each other.

TIGERS GAME REALLY SOUNDED THE WARNING BELLS

But the game against Leicester Tigers, who sent a second string team to Cape Town, was like an object lesson on how not to pay any heed to what had worked for the Stormers earlier in the season. The alarm bells were clanging after that game, but it felt safe to predict a Stormers win in the derby over the Sharks just because it felt obvious that they’d have learned their lesson.

From an early point of the coastal clash it was obvious that was a wrong assumption. It was so glaringly obvious from the vantage point of the DHL Stadium press box that the freneticism of the Stormers’ approach, the throwing the ball around behind the advantage line and the Hail Mary passes, was playing into the Sharks’ hands.

The visitors knew, like the under-strength Leicester did the weeks before, that by sticking to the per centages they’d be okay.

Obviously there was more to it than that, like the Stormers horror show in the lineouts that rendered their many 22 entries futile, as well as the great homework the Durban team had also done on blunting the feared Stormers’ maul.

But still, the impression persisted that the Stormers were set up all wrong, and it was impossible to forget what Dobson said the day before about there being more pressure to entertain when his team plays at home.

DOBSON’S VIEW DIFFERED FROM OUR PERCEPTION

Entertain they did, particularly if you were a Sharks supporter, but surely this was a lesson learned? Nope, at the post-match press conference Dobson had some of us questioning what we’d seen.

“This wasn’t a game where we were seduced by romanticism, this wasn’t a game where we overplayed. We did overplay in previous games, I agree with you, but not in this one,” said Dobson.

🔟 round in. Who's in control? 👀@Vodacom #URC pic.twitter.com/LfUBJC0Rif — Vodacom United Rugby Championship (URC) (@URCOfficial_RSA) January 25, 2026

Maybe the coach knows better, except that watching the re-run of the game on Sunday reconfirmed the initial impression, which judging from feedback since the game seems widely shared.

The line in the supersport.com match report that the Stormers supporters would prefer an ugly win over the Sharks to a defeat where the team satisfies a perceived DNA but doesn’t get anything to show for it wasn’t concocted through an exhaustive scientific study, but has been supported in so many conversations since the game.

DURBAN COULD BE A TELLING DAY IN STORMERS’ SEASON

The Stormers go to Durban next and it is humid there in January so they might well experience what their arch-rivals, the Vodacom Bulls, just have - in two overseas games the Bulls had to move away from the sevens style running rugby that was tripping them up at home and resort to what used to be their staple, and they won both. Ugly wins, but more satisfying to Bulls fans no doubt, and there really should be no conversations necessary to establish this, than the entertaining defeats in high scoring games in two Champions Cup games at Loftus.

For the Bulls, after the long sequence of defeats, the ‘w’ became more important, and their fans will hope they take cognisance and retain some element of pragmatism when they face the Lions in Johannesburg on Saturday. Ellis Park will provide perfect conditions for running rugby, but the Bulls will be better off bringing balance to their game.

And there’s the word, for it applies to the Stormers too. No-one is saying put away every attacking weapon. Just re-establish the balance that was applied in Treviso, Limerick and Bayonne. The Stormers had their game right overseas, the results tell us as much.

The Kings Park game might indeed be a telling moment in their season - win ugly because they have to because of the conditions and it might just stop some of the denial in a camp that was so clear headed earlier but is now starting to betray signs of an onset of confusion.