Stormers to ‘stick to plan’ to rest Bok players in coming weeks

The Stormers are set to rotate their team and juggle their Springboks over the next two United Rugby Championship (URC) matches going into the November international break.

A Bok heavy Stormers team have picked up two home wins over the past two weekends, 39-22 over the Sharks in the URC and 49-12 over Bristol Bears in their Champions Cup opener this past Saturday.

Of their Bok contingent, only Siya Kolisi has played an extra game, after he took an amazing journey from Australia to meet up with them on tour in Ireland, before featuring for the Stormers against Edinburgh in Scotland, while the rest had that weekend off after finishing their national team duties.

But with the Springboks having four Nations Championship games in the Europe on their end-of-year-tour next month, it wouldn’t be right for the Stormers to play all their Boks over the next two matches.

“We have to stick to the critical path. We need to give (Junior Springbok loosehead prop) Ollie Reid a game in the next two, because we can’t always rely on Ntuks (Ntuthuko Mchunu) and Vernon (Matongo),” explained Director of Rugby John Dobson about possible personnel changes.

“At some stage Sacha (Feinberg-Mngomezulu) is going to need a break, otherwise we are going to destroy him for the (Springboks) Nations Championship games, and because of the amount of game time (for the Boks and Stormers) he’s had. So he clearly needs a break.

“The same applies to Damian (Willemse), we have a plan with Paul (de Villiers) and others. So we will just stick to our plan. I don’t think we’ve seen anything this weekend that will cause us to panic (about changing the plan).”

Perfect opposition

Although they won’t admit it, the Stormers have the perfect opposition to rotate their team against this coming weekend in Welsh side Llanelli Scarlets, who are one of the URC’s regular strugglers, and though they can’t take any team lightly, they should be comfortable backing their wider squad against them.

They then face a trickier challenge a week later against Irish side Ulster who they will likely want to have some of their big guns in the group for, while they will also want to make sure they continue winning all their home games in Cape Town.

Another player who could get a go in his regular position is Wandisile Similane, who was a late call-up for the Bristol game at outside centre for regular Stormers captain Ruhan Nel, who picked up a calf injury in training and could possibly be out for a while.

“We’ve got to get him more (game time). He covers 15 for us, he’s benched on the wing and handled the contestables last week (against the Sharks). He obviously wants a crack at 13, but it’s tough when your regular captain is there,” explained Dobson.

“This experiment with (captaining) Paul (de Villiers) would allow us to give Wandi more opportunities. Ruan is 35, he’s not going to play every game, but Wandi does deserve more rugby than what we’ve probably given him, and he deserves to be in his position.

“That’s why we call it the critical path. If we can just plan and say to him, ‘Wandi, you’re going to miss out this week, you’ve got two benches, you’ve got two starts’. The guys know where they stand.”