As the Stormers overseas tour came to an end on Friday night with a last-minute 31-24 loss against Cardiff, coach John Dobson has described the result as his sides’ worst performance of the tour.
It was a game in which the Stormers were never behind until long after the final siren sounded, and Cardiff crashed over for a winning try. But it was a game that the Stormers should have won easily, and which they would have, if they had not delivered such an error strewn performance.
Speaking after the game Dobson said: “I didn’t expect us to play like that, I must say. I think it was by far our worst performance on tour, which is disappointing.
“I don’t know why we did that. That’s what I talked about in the change room, why we needed to do that. Just take the ball through the phases and eventually they will crack, or we will get a penalty and we go to the corner, and we can have a go.
“But we seemed to make errors all the time. That was a really poor performance by us in that respect.
“That wasn’t a pleasant experience. If you just take what happened in the last minutes, we were sort of on attack around the middle of the field. We do our thing, our scrumhalf does a pick and go, and we get turned over.
“It comes back, they kick it, (we) knock it on and the scrum, end of the game. I think at that time we could have taken a draw.”
The Stormers now return to Cape Town after a European tour that saw them record losses against Glasgow Warriors, Benetton, Munster and Cardiff. Their next outing in the URC is against Zebre in Stellenbosch in Saturday 2nd December.
