John Dobson says the DHL Stormers found their “pomp” against Leinster on Saturday night and are ready to fire on a two-match Vodacom URC tour. DYLAN JACK reports.
The DHL Stormers got their drive for a top-eight finish in the Vodacom URC back on track with a five-try bonus-point victory over Leinster in Cape Town.
The win propelled the Stormers to fifth place on the table, as they rebounded from the shock home defeat to Ospreys last week.
Following a break this week, the Stormers will embark on a two-week mini-tour of the UK and Ireland, where they will take on Dragons in Newport and fellow playoff hunters Connacht in Galway.
Having returned winless from their four-match tour earlier this season, the Stormers will be hoping for better fortunes up north, but Dobson is confident of turning around their away form.
“The previous tour was at the start of the season,” Dobson explained. “We knew we would come home and have to catch up. The loss to Ospreys at home knocked us properly.
“We are now under a massive points situation. The devastation of that result against Ospreys was that we could have finished that weekend two points behind the Bulls, looking for a home playoff. That’s pretty much unrecoverable.
“Now, it’s a must-win tour. We’ve never had that sort of feeling before, our level of desperation. We are taking our Springboks. This will be a different mindset from the first tour. It’s full metal jacket to try win every game.
“We have to be better in those conditions,” Dobson added. “The big thing is we’ve made improvements this season around contestables. We won the contestable game well tonight, I was pleased with that.”
Aiding the Stormers is that they are unlikely to face the same wet and snowy conditions they have battled in during previous tours, held during the northern hemisphere’s winter months.
The Stormers will also travel having rediscovered a bit of their physical edge against Leinster, something Dobson was particularly pleased about.
“Tonight, the way it finished, I thought we had our pomp back,” Dobson said. “We are not going to change how we play, we just all learned last week to be a bit more circumspect.
“You could see we still lacked a bit of confidence and some of the same stuff was there in the first half. But the way we fought through that, makes me very proud. The team responded. Physically, the way we carried, was very, very good.
“It didn’t build confidence, being in the corner that we were in, so it’s a massive credit to them for the way they fought. It was a really compelling performance.”
Photo: Ashley Vlotman/Gallo Images
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Src: sarugbymag.co.za
