Stormers show same resilience for 2 weekends in a row on the road
For two weekends in a row, the Stormers have looked down and out on the road but have shown the same remarkable resilience to avoid defeat and keep themselves very much in contention to win the South African Shield in the United Rugby Championship.
Last weekend in Pretoria, they were 26-18 down against the Bulls with just 12 minutes left, but the Stormers scored two brilliant breakaway tries at the death to win 30-26. This weekend, they were trailing 19-3 after 51 minutes and their scrum was getting mangled against the Sharks in Durban, but they fought back to snatch a 22-22 draw.
Those seven away points have lifted the Stormers to 12th place on the log with 14 points, just two behind the 10th-placed Sharks.
“You’ve got to be quite resilient to be a Stormers player these days and these players have obviously got bucket-loads of that,” Dobson beamed after their latest escape. “Things went for us … I thought we were dead, buried and finished.
“We conceded 18 penalties, seven of them at the scrum. I’m not sure what era of Western Province rugby would ever have seen that sort of count before.
“To get seven points away from home these last two weeks is really good, especially when you play as poorly as we did today. That was probably our worst performance of the URC.
“But I’m really very happy, it proves the guys are tight, they are showing that fight. If we keep this group together, we could be a reasonable team. Just give us some time,” Dobson said.
The Stormers coach seemed to acknowledge that his side had been outplayed and that, on a normal day, they would have suffered defeat.
“It was not a great game from us, we lacked organisation and control and that slowed our game down, until we decided to speed things up a bit in the second half. But our game-management was poor.
“The truth is we were lucky. The Sharks were not at their full pomp, but they had enough chances to finish us. But we defended their maul well,” Dobson said.