Stompies V Glasgow this weekend

This so gonna be a damn tough game for the Stormers.

Glasgow will have acclimated to SA by Saturday and will have done some healing. There will also be a lot more air available...cos Cape Town, and Steyn will be available.

Meanwhile the Stormers seem to be well into a regression and don't yet look like they've reached the bottom.

The thing that hurt Glasgow on the weekend was decisive offloading and playing with purpose. We said it during the game numerous times. The Lions played positive but sensible rugby. Those two words, positive and sensible, don't seem possible for the Stompies at the moment. It's either positivity that results in chaos or sensibility that result in bashing to nowhere.

How many times did the Lions shift the point of contact and what was the result? In Dobbos mind that's apparently a 50/50. It probably is a 50/50 if you have no actual plan or confidence but when you do have a plan and you are organised, you start leaning toward inevitability. The Lions extracted 4.7 points from each 22m entry on Saturday. That's almost a try every time they got into the 22. Granted, it was a freak of a game for them but I'd love to know if Ivan(mine and Pakie's new crush) believes a ball on the opposition try line is a 50/50. I'd be very surprised if he does.

Am I crazy to think that the Stormers best chance is to chuck Sacha the ball and say "Win us the game?"

...and if that has a possibility of being your best chance of winning then where are you as a team?

What are your thoughts?

Dobbo needs to pick a better side and let them play. He'll need to gamble. Get rid of Zas who has been an absolute nothing burger the entire season. Bring in fresh blood like JC Mars. Toss this out there:

9 Khan (maybe Reinach but he looks off the boil)

10 Sacha

11 Mars

12 Roche (easily better than D-Dup)

13 Nel / Simelane but Nel in terms of leadership and organization is probably the better option

14 Hartzenberg / Simelane

15 Willemse

The pack is solid but Paul Div probably needs to start, I'd even have Theunissen for Dixon, who hasn't set things alight either. And then play rugby, stop the kicking nonsense. Have Jurie on the bench should it be necessary for a shift where Willemse might come to 12 and Jurie cover 10/15.

"Dobbo needs to pick a better side and let them play. He'll need to gamble. Get rid of Zas who has been an absolute nothing burger the entire season. Bring in fresh blood like JC Mars. Toss this out there:"

The problem is that when they "play" it becomes chaos and they just lose ground.

But that is probably their only chance because they're not gonna out game manage Glasgow.

I'd love to see if Gelant gets picked at 15 again.

I'd also start Divvy. At least with him there is some kind of threat on the ground.

The Stormers are gonna have to play out of their skins because the last two sides Glasgow faced were no joke and if they feel the Stormers don't bring the same intensity and precision it'll put some wind in their sails.

If were Dobbo id want all my best players being as involved as possible. So I might do Jurie 10, Willemse 12, Sacha 15.

At least that way you have a good territorial player at 10 and if the opposition blindly kick it back your 15 is a real threat.

Still, that's a patch job because Willemse should be at 15, Sacha and Jurie rotating at 10 and the rest of the team well oiled and firing at this point in the season.

The Stormers can play. There were some good passages in that last game, offloading and support running. The question is how much time they spend in training on that, how zeroed in they are on that, how open to spotting and exploiting those opportunities. The first impulse still seems to be kicking the ball. There's an irritating safety first conservative vibe hanging over our sides (again, Lions excepted, when I say anything negative about SA sides just assume that the Lions are not included). And it's not like they're getting results playing like that. The Bulls weren't hot shit either on the weekend, they just faced an opponent who had no goal line defense so they could brute force it over time and again. They won't always have that luxury.

If you read some of the comments they made after the weekend, they're fascinated with the aerial game.

I'm sure they look just as good at training as any of the French sides. Being able to do it is probably only half of the picture. Knowing when to do it is the other half and our teams seem to struggle with that part.

It's like we only have a licence to run the ball when it's very obvious that we should. And then it's so obvious and we're so nervous that it doesn't amount much.

That's what i like so much about Grant Williams. He's so quick to rucks and so snappy with his passing that he almost deprives the backs of the opportunity to be nervous or to over think things. The amount of times I've seen him come on for the Shark and immediately they look like they know what they're doing.

I also think that's another problem that the box kicking nonsense creates. It gets everybody into the slow mindset where every ruck is a two hour event. So you lose the rhythm of quick recycle and play. Which is totally the opposite to how the Frechie sides do it. They have these long phases of constantly recycling quickly and shifting the ball around. So they hit this rhythm where their game flows and they're punching from different angles. And to me it's obvious that that's the most effective rhythm to be in - build some territory and then switch to bliksim from all sides mode.

The Stormers feel very far away from that for me. They don't seem to have the cohesion, timing or control be able to play like that. They do have the players, so that's something.

Still, I hope they take your advice and play the ball instead of kicking the logo off of it. At the very least, it'll be a better watch.

You can see the Big Three don't have much match practice doing the expansive game - as you say they look nervous when they do, passes get dropped or fall into space, etc. and they still look for contact, contact, contact.

Unlike the Lions, for whom it appears second nature now, how they run support, how smoothly they offload, how they shift the ball away from contact. Look at the third try of the game by Henko - they beat 4 defenders with two men, essentially. Mahashe is the only one running at the defense. By the time Francke gets the ball from him, he (Francke) has shifted himself wide of the first cluster of 2x defenders and is running at the second cluster while Henko is already drifting wide of that cluster for the pass. They're not seeking contact, they're looking to get past the contact.

"You can see the Big Three don't have much match practice doing the expansive game - as you say they look nervous when they do, passes get dropped or fall into space, etc. and they still look for contact, contact, contact."

This was something I spoke about when the Lions were coached by Akker/Swys.

Faf's kicking game was insanely effective. Far more than it ever was for the Boks.

The reason...

Those Lions, much like these, didn't run out to prove they could knock you over. They looked for space and effective running lines. The amount of times Whitely would run an awkward diagonal at pace and receive a pop pass from Faf, then either score or break though and offload. It was a theme. And then while the opposition were back peddling Faf would chip into space or grubber and it was immensely effective when he did.

What we see from the SA teams now is that they ignorantly run into a brick wall over and over and then kick when nothing works. The other thing we see is kicks that are born out of being too nervous to screw up when some momentum has been built up. Very little of it is confident kicking. To my mind, that massively detracts from the value of the kicking because the opposition are set up and waiting for it as opposed to being out of position due to a break of their line. That's not to say one should kick every time you make a break, far from it. But it is a weapon and once you have momentum, bringing the kick out from time to time only adds to the randomness of your attack and makes it more difficult for opposition to set up.

Look at a guy like Roos. Everything about him screams "Let me pick up speed and pop me the ball because I threaten the gap like no other forward in Cape Town." But when do we ever see it? The only time we ever see it happen is when he creates those moments for himself. They're never set up to get the best out of him.

Last season I was complaining about that exact thing with Venter. The Lions were constantly using him from a static start and he was pretty ineffective when they did that. This season they have set up to allow him to build up a head of steam...and the results are clearly fruitful ones.

There is a mindlessness about our rugby. And the sad part is, much like the Akker/Swys Lions...too few will pay attention to actually realise the obvious and make the adjustments or emulate their strategies. Think about. The 2016 Lions where putting 50 points past the best SR teams and nobody ever managed to recapture that, even with teams comprising some of the best players in the world...while the Lions did it with no name branders. The mindlessness comes from the top.

Granted, this is pure couch commentary. But it is based on what one observes week in and week out.