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URC WRAP: Good reasons why Stormers are best SA team so far

rugby27 October 2025 05:00
By:Gavin Rich
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Stormers © Getty Images

With five games completed the international break comes just one match short of a third of the way through the Vodacom United Rugby Championship season and it is the DHL Stormers who are in a league of their own when it comes to the South African teams.

John Dobson’s men are one of just two teams unbeaten at the end of the first phase, and that other team, Munster, came close to losing at home to Connacht at the weekend. The Stormers top the log by virtue of their vastly superior points difference after they completed perhaps their best ever overseas tour by winning their clutch game against Benetton.

It was a clutch game from the sense that although they’d already beaten Zebre and the Scarlets on tour, they’d never won in Treviso against the much stronger of the two Italian sides and they said beforehand that the game would be the litmus test for the changes they have made in their quest to improve their overseas record.

They passed that examination with flying colours, coming from 16-8 down at halftime to dominate the second half, where they scored 23 unanswered points to deal a severe blow to any title contentions that Benetton may harbour.

The Stormers’ next game is away against Munster and of course they won’t be helped by the fact that the Springboks will be playing Wales that day outside of the international window.

LIONS WIN WASN’T THE SURPRISE SOME MAKE OUT

However, it was important for them to beat Benetton so that they can travel to Limerick five weeks hence with some confidence, and they did that on a weekend where the Lions were the other standout local performers with their win over Ulster.

By beating Ulster in an early afternoon shoot-out, a kick-off time that always suits them in home games where visiting teams have to deal with heat in addition to the altitude, the Lions helped the other local teams as Ulster had been flying before they got to Johannesburg.

In fact, that was probably one of the reasons they lost - while the result might have surprised many, it did not surprise me, as readers of the supersport.com preview on Friday will know.

A Lions win was predicted, and not just because of the advantages the Lions have at home in the summer months but also what beating the Vodacom Bulls and Hollywoodbets Sharks in successive weeks would have taken out of Ulster.

 

 

When they won in Durban, Ulster would have thought it was their mission accomplished in South Africa, and they sent back some of their Ireland internationals in the week building up to the Ellis Park game. That is not to denigrate the Lions’ achievement - they were very good at times in their win and being at home has brought back some of their strut after a poor overseas tour.

However, given that their commitment to the Currie Cup in the weeks building up to the URC kick-off usually comes back to bite them much later in their campaign, through the fatigue that sets in, they should be lamenting a record that reads three losses in five starts. It puts them eighth, but they were supposed to be battle hardened from playing in the domestic playoffs.

CAPE TEAM BENEFITTING FROM GOOD PRE-SEASON PREP

The Stormers, as their Alta-ego Western Province, never chased Currie Cup success this year, and went all-out development instead, with very little cross-over between the domestic squad and the URC squad, and it is one of the reasons they’ve started so well.

They are also the diametric opposite of the Hollywoodbets Sharks, in the sense that with only Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, Damian Willemse and Cobus Reinach missing to the Springbok Castle Lager Rugby Championship campaign, they had nearly all hands on deck during the pre-season.

It meant that, much like two of the other teams that have done well so far, Munster and Ulster, they’ve got the team work, culture and combination gel that the Sharks, who at times only had eight players at training in the pre-season as injuries were added to the absence of the Boks, just don’t have.

SHARKS STILL STUTTERED

And while the Sharks did finally break their duck by beating the Scarlets, and their attack was better than the previous week, at least in the first half, their coach John Plumtree was still far from happy at the post-match press conference.

Rightly so too, for his team still stuttered, and watching from the vantage point of the Hollywoodbets Kings Park press box, it seemed evident that once again the team appeared to lack energy for periods of the game.

That led to the soft moments that kept the Scarlets in the game, such as when Vincent Tshituka lazily reached out to stop a kick from the Scarlets fullback that led to the player scoring his team’s second try. He should have dived on the ball. Later he let the ball bounce.

 

 

Pinpointing Tshituka though may be unfair because he’s not one of the top Boks in the Sharks team and it was there that the alarm bells should maybe be ringing for more than just the Sharks coach but also for Bok coach Rassie Erasmus.

The constant treadmill the Boks are on with the commitment to the Rugby Championship in what should be the offseason is going to catch up with them some time and, to put it frankly, many of them just looked tired against the Scarlets. And against Ulster the previous week.

That wasn’t the case for the Stormers on their tour with the Bok duo they drew on, Feinberg-Mngomezulu for two games and Willemse for all three, mainly because neither of those two players have been over-played in the past year.

It will be recalled that Willemse was out injured for much of the last URC season, and so was Feinberg-Mngomezulu, who also missed the last November Bok tour.

DURBANITES PAYING FOR POOR CONTRACTING

The Stormers though don’t overly rely on those two players, and that is where their contracting has been so much better over a period of time than the Sharks.

When a headline appeared on the Stormers team announcement press release stating that there were eight changes from the team that won in Parma, it was easy to imagine the team had been weakened. That usually is the case with the Sharks, where there is a wide chasm between the first choice team and second choice team.

That is not the case with the Stormers though, and they were as strong, if not stronger, going into the Benetton game than they were the previous week. Which is a testament to the depth that director of rugby Dobson is building up at the franchise.

As it turned out the man who replaced Feinberg-Mngomezulu, man of the match Jurie Matthee, turned in a dominating performance, with his contribution far exceeding just the 21 personal points he contributed.

Apart from the Stormers and Munster the other surging team in the competition is Glasgow Warriors, who showed their class in beating the Bulls in Glasgow at the start of the weekend. There wasn’t really any surprise about the result as the Warriors are hard to beat at the Scotstoun, but the Bulls, after two defeats, will be under pressure when the URC resumes at the end of November.

So will the Sharks and the Lions, with the Stormers experiencing a more positive kind of pressure - in the sense that a win in Limerick will really put them in the pound seats.

 

 

Fifth Round Vodacom URC results

Vodacom Bulls 12 Glasgow Warriors 21

Lions 49 Ulster 31

Dragons 19 Ospreys 19

Hollywoodbets Sharks 29 Scarlets 19

Benetton 16 DHL Stormers 31

Leinster 50 Zebre 26

Munster 17 Connacht 15

Cardiff Rugby 20 Edinburgh 19

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