Jean and Habana still our best backs.......by a mile

Jean did so many good things today, stepping into the way of the pass, passing at the right moments, flipping Kirchner off the ball like a twig, cutting the line with ease....great game. Habana was if anything even better, superb under the high ball, great on the ground....dangerous ball in hand. These two great Springboks still have a lot to offer. - Among the other players Aplon showed why he could play 15 for the Boks with ease. Van den Heever had a few moments. De Jongh was more productive than Engelbrecht and beat him once....and Van Aswegen had some good moments.Schreuder unfortunately knocks on too much in his haste. - In the pack the Kitshoff and Ntubeni were excellent. Fourie handily outplayed Stegman....HasBeen was right, this guy would not disgrace the Boks at fetcher. And Etzebeth was a giant. Those looking for reasons the Stormers were so much better in the second half of the S15, need look no further than the return of Etzebeth. - The Bools were pretty clueless, and will have to up their game in the playoffs. Their front row was decimated until the subs took the sting out of the Stormers scrumming. Eben dominated their locks....Flip Flop looks way out of shape. - In the backs Morne gave them chances with some clever angled kicks and Basson looked dangerous. For the rest they were dominated at centre and clueless at the back. - At Loftus the Bools will be a different team and they were facing a very determined Stormers side today. But the inability to do anything once the maul was stopped wont be lost on their opponents. The opportunity is palpable, stop the Bools maul and you win.

Mozart Have to agree with you about De Villiers and Habana. I said elsewhere that if the Stormers were not bloody fools they would have been in the play-offs if they selected the following backline:- 15 Aplon 14 Van den Heever 13 De Villiers 12 De Allende 11 Habana 10 Van Aswegen 9 Schreuder That backline would have shown results - the wrong choices were Pietersen, De Jongh and Jantjies.

Nope, there is no statistically meaningful difference for the games De Jongh didn't play....and in fact he played a large perecentage of his matches out of the country which should have dropped his win ratio. It didn't. And Jantjies was the only option after everybody else got hurt.....and Pietersen kept us in the game with his boot. No those changes were not the issue. - The real problem was the loss of Etzebeth. Our win ratio was 71% with Etzebeth playing and 56% with him out. And the only two losses with Eben playing occurred in the first two games after his return. Once he had some playing time under his belt, the Stormers reeled off 5 straight wins. There's your X factor.

Mozart You won't accept that De Jongh was rubbish - wherever he played. He was the only center with atrocious defence stats of 25% missed tackles overall and no penetration in attacks - nothing - zilch. If his attacking capacity was worth anything - it could to an extent off-set his poor defence - but there really was nothing at all. You cannot have passengers with that kind of performance in a winning team - end of story. Staitstically De Jongh played in 11 matches - 4 of which was out of the country - how come that represent a large percentage? Get real. His overall stats was a disgrace - whether at home or away. Your observation about Jantjies is total claptrap as well. Van Aswegen was a better option, but he was never injured and rarely used whilst Jantjies was used whenever he was fit to play. He was a huge liability overall and cost the Stormers dearly in most matches lost by them. Because of him - the Stormers could not field their best backline at all - the one I gave above. Etzebeth made a huge difference - there is no doubt about that.

True, but if Jantjies missed that tackle on Kirchner, everybody would have been all over him. I don't think choosing van Aswegen was a sure fire way to improve theStormers record SB.

OOm this is how it works. The statistical null hypothesis is that there is no difference in the Stormers performance if de Jongh plays or doesn't play. But you say there is a statistical difference and set out to disprove the null hypothesis at some level of confidence....hopefully for your case, north of 95%. You in effect attempt to prove that de Jongh's games come from a different, lower, probability distribution. - But your first problem is the expected values (or average win ratios) are remarkably similar. In total the Stormers win 11 out of 16 games at an average of 0.56. With de Jongh they win 6 out of 11 games at an average of 0.54. Right there you have a problem proving you have two different probability distributions. - But De Jongh has 4 games in 11 in Oz/NZ....the team has 4 in 16.....ie has 5 more games at home. With De Jongh in the team the Stormers won 5 of 7 games in RSA. So if he played 5 more games in RSA...the expected result would have been 5*5/7 more wins....or 3.57 more wins. Hence the de Jongh expected wins out of a 16 match rotation would have been 9.57 wins, including the Canes defeat in NZ. - That expected value actually beats the team's expected value of 9 wins. So the chances of disproving the null hypothesis, with the corrected de Jongh probability distribution with a higher win ratio......is in effect nil. The null hypothesis that de Jongh does not reduce team performance is upheld.

Mozart De Jongh played in three games in New Zealand in Ausrtralia - not 4 as alleged by you. He came on late in the Hurricanes game and did squad. By the time he came on the game was won already - the,only tour game the Stormers won. The rest they all lost The problem also was not only De Jongh - don't forget about the Jantjies factor as well. Howver, it is the team that played a role in all games - not only De Jongh or Jantjies. You are mixing up the team performance as a whole as against the role of individual performances. That is a very indirect way of trying to hide poor performances of individual players by using general team performance as a norm. That is what I call abuse of statistics. The issue here is in games lost by the Stormers De Jongh;s missed tackle stats were even higher than the 25% quoted by me. It at times reached 40% - you cannot tell me that that kind of performance did not contribute to the team losses. But then you support a player who over a three year period scored 6 tries in both Super 15 rugby and in CC series he played in. That shows he is really a poor quality player he is as well. All the ries he scored was created by others for him - he created NOTHING.

Wrong OOm he started in the Hurricanes game. Check your facts. What I have laid out here is a very crude statistical approach. A more scientific effort would be to set up point spreads in probability distributions for each team player and the whole team.You would then be able to calculate the expected point spread for each player and the variance. By doing this for the team you could set up limits for the 95% probability spreads for the team....establish the tails as it were. But no de Jongh observation will come even near either tail.....unless it's the wins over the Bulls and the Cheetahs.....which would disprove your case. - Sorry OOm, your dog wont hunt.

Mozart Please continue living in dreamland - De Jongh statistically was still the worse center in Super 15 with an average of 13 points per game for Foxsport and 135 points per game on Test Rugby. Those scores mirrors points allocated and their stats are in line with ESPN Scrum. As far as backline play in general is concerned - his defence is uselessly poor and his attack the same. Those stats are not acceptable and he should have been dropped from the team early on. Your way of trying to hide his deficiencies is however extremely comical and farcical