Need to win a close one

I have been playing around with this crystal ball thingie on my desk, and Bulls and Stormers fans should be pleased that the information it gives me isn’t always reliable.

If anything, it is the scenario that most South Africans won’t be hoping for, but here goes – Bulls and Stormers end up playing for home ground advantage in the play-offs when they clash in the final league game; Bulls win convincingly, but then lose the semi at Loftus; Stormers go to Christchurch for final against Crusaders, and lose.

There we are. Now that I have put it out there, let me explain why this vision shouldn’t really make sense. They may be top of the log at present, but if any team in the leading three at the moment is at a disadvantage, it must surely be the Crusaders.

They have to come to South Africa to face the Stormers and Bulls still, and surely home ground advantage should mean something to the two local teams. They are seven time champions, and that tells you they know how to win the big ones, but come on, surely the local teams are not going to allow the Crusaders to finish top of the log?

Yet it could well happen, particularly if the Sharks do what South African teams tend to do to one another at around this time of the year by putting an engineering tool in the works. I can’t see the Sharks winning at Loftus next week, but their Durban game against the Stormers is a slightly different story.

Indeed, and I really shouldn’t be saying this while living in the Cape, it is still entirely possible the Stormers miss out on the play-offs completely as the four games they still have to play are all going to be tough ones. Not so the Bulls, who host the Lions this week and should just be way too good for their neighbours.

On current form, however, you might struggle to disagree with All Black coach Graham Henry’s view that the Stormers are the team to beat. It is easier to find fault at the moment with the Bulls, who seem to be struggling to settle on game strategy, their defence and the adaptation to the newest law interpretations, than it is to find fault with the Stormers.

The Cape team have been in outstanding form for the past two weeks, and the figures, as they stack up at the moment, tell you they have every right to be near the top of the log.

Apart from seven wins in nine games, there is the small fact of just 11 tries conceded in those games, and a points differential that is way superior to the other teams in contention. So if it comes down to a couple of teams being tied at the top, and the Stormers are one of them, the chances are Schalk Burger’s men will have the advantage.

But there is something worrying me, and it has everything to do with the Stormers’ dominance in most of their games. Ahead of Friday’s match against the Reds, the Stormers have denied opposition teams bonus points in every game they have won. In other words, they have won by more than seven and denied the opposition four tries in seven of their matches.

What it means though is that the Stormers have not had the experience that the Reds were thankful for this last weekend against the Bulls. Afterwards some of the players said in television interviews that they were grateful for their recent narrow win over the Chiefs in Hamilton as it gave them confidence to win the close ones.

The Stormers have had just two close games this season, and they are the two games they have lost. In both of them there was an element of them gifting it to the opposition in the tense final minutes, and in both there was a sense that the Stormers were a bit rattled by what for them has now become the rare feeling of being under pressure.

If it was just those two games I might not have brought it up, but it actually extends further back than that. As Western Province, the bulk of the players in this current team lost in the nailbiting last minutes against the Bulls in last year’s Currie Cup semi-final.

A week before that it was a similar story in the last league match against the Lions, and there was also a late defeat in the match against the Cheetahs in Bloemfontein.

Stormers fans with dickey hearts will be thankful for the space their team has put between themselves and the opposition in most games this season, but sometime before the play-offs it might be helpful if they have to dig deep and come from behind to win. It can only make them mentally stronger, and mental strength becomes important when the trophy is on the line.