Stormers lament tries and cards that never came

A coach and captain can get into a lot of trouble for openly criticising a referee, and Robbie Fleck and Steven Kitshoff stopped just short of doing that after their frustrating two-point defeat to the Brumbies at Newlands on Saturday.

The fact the Brumbies had to make a monumental 226 tackles illustrates just how dominant the Stormers were on the day, but although they were twice over the whitewash without a try being awarded, and forced penalty after penalty within the opposition 22, the visitors were able to survive and score an important win.

Coach Fleck made no attempt afterwards to hide from his own team’s culpability. The Stormers simply made too many errors, they conceded two soft tries early in the game that ensured they were the chasing team for much of it, and later in the game they were stripped of possession far too often.

“We should have done more with the possession we commanded, we are not hiding from that, and we should have executed better. Our conversion rate in their 22 should have been better,” said Fleck.

But Fleck also felt that New Zealand coach Nick Briant had stymied his team by allowing the Brumbies to get away with their tactic of trying to slow the game down.

To many observers the most obvious way to improve the conversion rate in the 22 would have been to kick some of the numerous penalties the Stormers were awarded. Getting the scoreboard moving would have stopped the Brumbies from using the tactic, as Fleck and Kitshoff saw it, of infringing with impunity in an attempt to slow the game down.

But while agreeing with the benefit of hindsight that perhaps his players had made the wrong call, he said he always backed the decisions made by the players on the field.

"I have to back the captain on that, the players felt we had them, and you have to remember that at the time we were turning penalties down we were behind in the game," said Fleck.

"So I do understand the decisions in that regard. Maybe in hindsight it should have been different. But I backed it at the time. We attempted a penalty towards the end through Josh Stander in an attempt to get the lead and he missed. Then a few minutes later we had another penalty in a more difficult position near the touchline.

"We set up an attacking lineout and that maul was sacked two or three metres from the line and we didn’t get the penalty. It was small margins. There were plenty of penalties that they conceded, and I felt the referee should have yellow carded them earlier in the game to sort that out. They were deliberately slowing the game down by giving away breakdown penalties."

Of course if that was so obvious to the coaching box it is confounding that an instruction wasn’t issued to kick the points. Apart from getting the Stormers back into the game on the scoreboard and perhaps creating some scoreboard pressure, there is surely no better deterrent to a defending team living on the edge than conceding three pointers with each transgression.

However, Kitshoff argued that his team felt they were always on the brink of forcing the yellow card that never came.

"Getting into their 22 and being dominant and camping there but not converting was very frustrating," said the Springbok prop.

"Having so many penalties takes you out of your rhythm and we felt we had them under a lot of pressure and that they were about to give away a yellow card. We felt we had to keep the pressure on them."

Fleck also contended that Briant erred in not calling play to a halt when Salmaan Moerat was down on the ground after being knocked unconscious. It was while Moerat was down that the Brumbies scored their match-winning third try.

"Salmaan was knocked out at that time and being attended to. It was a head injury so play should have been stopped so he could be removed from the field. That was when they scored," said Fleck.

Ultimately though Fleck agreed his team had only themselves to blame on a day when the error rate was unacceptably high, perhaps mostly because his players struggled to cope with the line-speed of the Brumbies’ committed and aggressive defensive system.

"We said afterwards that we felt like we had taken one step forward (in Melbourne last week) and then two steps back. Having said that, we did well to get back into the game, those 12 points we gave them through two tries near the start were soft. We were completely dominant for the remainder of the match.

"They didn’t really play much or try and engage with us. They just slowed the game down. The referee allowed them to do that, but you do have to give credit to their defence."

The Brumbies defence was freakishly good on the day and Fleck is right that they should be lauded for it. In some ways, the Brumbies did to the Stormers what the Stormers did to another Australian team, the Rebels, the previous week.

"We had to make 226 tackles to their 85, so it was an incredible effort and I have never been prouder of a group of men," said Brumbies coach Dan McKellar.

"We had very few chances. The ones we did have we took them. You have to do that away from home. In some games you are just better off without the ball, and this was one of those games. It was an incredibly brave effort across the board," he added.