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Stormers stutter to victory

Gavin Rich - SuperSport

Cape Town - The Stormers completed their warm-up phase to the Super Rugby season with a patchy 34-6 win over the Boland Cavaliers at Newlands on Saturday afternoon.

Although the Stormers were impressive after half-time and the management should be pleased with the way the youngsters again put up their hands, their first half was far too mistake-ridden for comfort and they again failed to engage all their cylinders.

Another sizeable crowd turned up for the derby friendly between the regional team and the pink clad Cavaliers, but by the time the game came to an end most of the Stormers fans were probably as pleased as the players that the silly season is now behind them and that the next time a game is played at Newlands it will be the real thing.

The Stormers won all three of their warm-up clashes, which included the two Neo Africa Tri-Series matches against the Lions and the Sharks before this one, but in none of them did they produce anything near the sort of compelling performance required to boost confidence before the kick-off to the new season.

It has been argued that perhaps the Stormers are pacing themselves in preparation for a season that extends into July and which will make massive demands on the players. There is some merit in that thinking as this will be a year where coming charging out of the blocks will mean nothing if the team doesn’t have the energy to sustain that momentum into month three and four of the competition.

Certainly the Stormers stake-holders will be hoping that their team has been in cruise control and adopting the marathon runner’s conservative start, for they don’t look to be anywhere near the space they were in this time last year.

The Stormers found proper rhythm for the first time two minutes after the break, with Schalk Burger’s team mounting an impressive hand to hand movement that put Jean de Villiers over unopposed in the corner to effectively end all thoughts of the game being a contest.

The Stormers had led just 12-3 at the break, and seven of those points were courtesy of a howling error on the part of the Bolanders, with flyhalf Willie le Roux being caught in possession on his own tryline and the TMO Shaun Veldsman adjudging, after much deliberation, that centre Tim Whitehead dotted the ball down for the try.

That was just a couple of minutes before half-time, and up until that point Boland had given as good as they received against their more highly rated opponents. The Stormers made a plethora of handling errors that cost them momentum, coach Allister Coetzee should again have been concerned at the penalties conceded, and generally there was a lack of co-ordination on attack.

The set-scrums were also a mess for most of the opening 40 minutes, with Boland giving the Stormers something to think about on occasion in this phase. Fortunately for the Stormers they would have been heartened by the rousing performance turned in at the scrums by the youngsters who came on after half-time.

But perhaps the area where Boland were most impressive was in the rucks and the mauls, where they kept the Stormers in check and the half-time statistics showed that the battle for possession in this phase just about broke even.

Of course this was by no means the first choice Stormers team, and for De Villiers and skipper Burger the match represented no more than an opportunity for them to get in some contact before the Lions match in a fortnight. De Villiers provided some of the rare moments of magic from the Stormers in the first half, while it was Burger who dotted down for the first try after an impressive lineout drive from a De Kock Steenkamp take.

Forward drives were a feature of the Stormers game last year and that looks like being the case again, but there are other areas of concern that need attention. For one, the issue of flyhalf back-up for Peter Grant is looking less positive for the Stormers than it was two weeks ago, with Elgar Watts failing to take the opportunity to impress in his first start in the No10 jersey.

Gary van Aswegen, impressive in his debut against the Lions in the Neo Africa series, was guilty of trying too much last week against the Sharks and it led to mistakes, but he does appear to control the game better than Watts does. Lionel Cronje came on for the Stormers in the second half and as he is potentially the best rounded pivot of all the players on the books it is a pity he was not given a more extended run in the warm-up phase.

That said, the warm-up games did give several young Cape players an opportunity to get to feel what it is like to play for the Stormers, and several of them showed plenty of potential, none the least of them being young scrummager Stephen Kitschoff, who is just a year out of school.

On the evidence of what we have seen the depth is arguably better now than it has been for some time. That is a tribute to the work done at the junior levels over the past 12 months, and the union might be set to reap the benefits of Western Province under-19 and under-21 teams winning their respective competitions last season.

Scorers:

Boland: Penalties: Jacquin Jansen (2).

Stormers: Tries: Schalk Burger, Tim Whitehead, Jean de Villiers, Elgar Watts, Ruan Kitshoff and JJ Engelbrecht. Conversions: Elgar Watts, Lionel Cronje.
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