Stormers showed how Boks should do it

Not everyone was in agreement that it was the greatest game of rugby they had ever seen, but the north/south derby between the Bulls and Stormers did have a few pointers for South African rugby's way forward.

The Bulls forwards were an awesome sight, with Victor Matfield, Pedrie Wanneburg, Christo Bezuidenhout and Richard Bands all showing in no uncertain terms that South Africa has hard, physical forwards around which the Springboks can build a platform when later this year they travel to Australia to challenge for the World Cup.

At the same time, the fact they lost the match gives the lie to the theory that a completely forward based approach would suffice. As the Bulls discovered, it may be true that forwards can win matches for you, but only if you have decent backs who know what to do with the ball when they get it in hand.

Against a committed defence such as the Stormers were on Saturday you cannot fritter away overlap opportunities, as the Bulls did, and still expect to win. Neither, as the Stormers showed when repelling a couple of forward charges near their own line, can you rely exclusively on brute force.

In this regard, one Stormers defensive scrum in the second half, when they were up against their own corner flag, might have been the turning point of the game. The Bulls, who had given better than they got in the scrums for most of the game, failed this time to get momentum and this prevented Wannenburg's attempted drive off the back from going anywhere.

Instead of conceding the try, the Stormers ended up turning the ball around and taking play back into Bulls territory. Many critics pointed to the Stormers' defence as the feature around which they based their victory, but for me there was a little word missing from most newspaper match reports after the game that ought to have been there - discipline.

The Stormers were one of the two South African teams that had consistently conceded less than 10 penalties a game before the Loftus battle and on Saturday they would have improved that average as again they turned in a performance which realised less than double figures.

Considering the pressure they were under for long periods of the match this was a stupendous effort on the part of the Cape team and one that they should not only be lauded for, but which should be used as a basis for South African rugby's way forward in this World Cup year.

Given that the Bulls enjoyed a telling territorial advantage for most of the match, there would have been only one result possible had the Stormers conceded something nearer the 20 penalties in the match which was the norm for South African teams in previous seasons.

With the accurate goalkicking boots of Louis Koen and later Derrick Hougaard in the opposition lineup, a greater harvest of penalties in the Bulls' favour would have kept the scoreboard ticking over and would have put the hosts out of sight.

If you are conceding three pointers every couple of minutes, as many Bulls opponents in previous years discovered, the quality of your own defence and your team's ability to prevent tries being scored against you becomes largely irrelevant.

You soon find yourself in a situation where the team is forced to play catch-up rugby, and then once that juncture of the match is reached, defences fall apart and the team which is winning the most ball capitalises.

Considering the work both players have done to eradicate disciplinary problems from their game, it is amusing to see Corne Krige (who did not play on Saturday) and Robbie Fleck still being fingered by critics for being a possible disciplinary liability at Springbok level.

This is surely a case of give a dog a bad name and he will keep it, or is it just that those who bring these allegations have not really done any close study of the Stormers games this season and instead are relying on past reputation?

Krige is not being allowed to forget the disciplinary infractions of his Springbok team when a combination of wide-eyed youths were reduced to 14 men at Twickenham last year, and perhaps rightly so. But right now he is captaining not only the most disciplined South African team in the Supper 12, but the whole competition (after four rounds, it was the Stormers who had conceded fewest penalties in the tournament), and that ought to be acknowledged - as indeed it has been by Bok coach Rudolf Straeuli.

As for Fleck, he has been the target of severe provocation this season, starting in the opening match where AJ Venter tried to head-butt him. Yet so far Fleck has kept to his promise of cleaning up his act and though there were signs of frustration starting to become evident in the middle stage of the overseas tour, he only has that one rather unlucky yellow card that he received against the Waratahs counter-balancing all his good work.

And after Saturday, both Fleck, who was on the field, and Krige, who watched on television, will be as convinced as ever about the benefits of maintaining discipline throughout 80 minutes. It was what won the Stormers the match in Pretoria and it could do the same for the Boks when they get to Perth in October.

I can think of no better way of nullifying the boot of Jonny Wilkinson than playing like the Stormers did at Loftus.