The following article from Supersport:-
"They’ve won three
games in three starts but the DHL Stormers won’t need to be told by outsiders that some urgent work is going to be required to their breakdown efficiency if they are to be competitive deeper into the Vodacom Super Rugby season and challenge for silverware.It was their inability to master the breakdowns and win quick ball that prevented them from taking control of a 14-man Blues outfit to the extent that they should have two weeks ago. And against the Emirates Lions this past weekend it was a similar story.
Indeed, apart from winning the ball back from the loose scrums too slowly, in both matches the Stormers also conceded too many turn-overs on the ground, something that robbed them of momentum as much as the much spoken about line-out ailments of the game in Johannesburg.
Part of the problem, in fact a big part of the problem, is that the Stormers don’t have a specialist fetcher in their ranks. Rynhardt Elstadt played openside flank until he was injured against the Blues and the Stormers just relied on his sheer physicality, rather than any kind of cunning as a scavenger, to make an impact on opponents at the breakdowns.
Nizaam Carr has moved into the No 6 role since Elstadt’s injury – he is out for four months – and he performed well when asked to scavenge in the last Super Rugby season. Indeed, although the job was new to him at the start, Carr was developing nicely towards the latter stages of the 2014 Super Rugby term, and had developed the necessary abrasiveness required of a fetcher.
This was never more evident than in the match against the Sharks late last May that the Stormers unexpectedly won in Durban. Carr was carded early in that match but his aggression and force to the ball played a big role in determining that the heavily favoured Sharks never got the momentum they were looking for and were ultimately beaten by a last gasp drop-goal from fullback Jaco Taute.
After that game some Sharks rugby people described Carr as a “monster” as they huddled around their braai fire on the floodlit Kings Park outerfields, and it was an apt description. However, since then Carr has returned to the linking and ball playing strengths that marked him as a potential star when he was a youngster at the Western Province Institute and spending the Currie Cup season in his preferred position of No 8 probably hasn’t helped him be ready for a return to his abrasiveness of 12 months ago.
More than that, Carr had bulked up for the more physical job description. During the month of Ramadan Carr lost heaps of weight, and it is debatable that he has regained the condition that gave him the confidence to mix it in the dark underworld inhabited by the fetching flank.
A solution to the Stormers’ apparent inability to turn over opposition ball on the ground with the same alacrity that opposing teams do it to them is not imminent, remembering of course that last year they still had Deon Fourie available. Regardless of whether he was selected at No 6 or at hooker, Fourie was every bit the specialist fetcher.
Schalk Burger is back in town from Japan and could conceivably fill a role he did for a time at the Boks, but perhaps more urgent, according to forwards coach Matt Proudfoot, is for the Stormers to play with the aggression he feels has been lacking thus far and has contributed to the lack of success at the breakdowns.
Cape Town sweltered in intense heat on Tuesday that had it ranked as the hottest city in the world on the day, with some people describing the heat as worse than Dubai, but that did not deter Proudfoot from putting his players through their paces and driving them hard in his quest to perfect the breakdown play ahead of the visit by the Sharks and the much improved breakdown exponent Marcell Coetzee this coming weekend.
“Heat? Heat is heat and you take the conditions as they come,” said Proudfoot in a telephone link-up with the Cape rugby media on Tuesday afternoon.
“The sharks, like the Lions and the Chiefs are really good at breakdown time. They will attack your attacking breakdown. We have a plan in place that we will train for the rest of the week in a quest to be more forceful when we clean out. I think that is going to be the key against the Sharks, to clean out the bodies that are contesting the ball.”
The Stormers team for the Sharks clash is to be named on Thursday. There is an outside chance that Burger could be in the match day squad even though he has only just returned from Japan."
This obviously is a problem for the future, but there is no reason for the Stormers to be worried this week in their game against the Sharks. The Sharks only have one breakdown player among their loosies and they made matters 100% worse by selecting the useless Alberts - who does not know what ball protection and recovery means and who stands around at the back of mauls because the dumb muscle does not know what is required from him in that situation.
The Sharks to a large extent lost the game last week against the Bulls because they could not contain Labuschagne and his massive role in breakdown ball protection and recovery. The fact that they now have an even worse loosie combination removes the threat of break down ball recovery even less problematic for the Stormers.
With Francois Steyn in the backline the Sharks will be stretched to recover the balls from every ball he crashballed with - and that is 95% of the balls he gets per game. It would be amusing to see what De Allende does with Steyn as an opponent.
