Groundhog Day effect a fatal Stormers flaw

Groundhog Day was a movie that starred Bill Murray, whose character found himself repeatedly waking up to the same day, keeping him rooted in time, with the calendar not moving forward.

Why this past weekend’s experience should have been like that for Stormers supporters was the lineout failures that blighted the early part of the game against the Vodacom Bulls and which was the major contribution to the team’s failure to launch. That a malfunctioning lineout can be fatal to chances of putting plans into place is not something Cape rugby people need much reminding about, for it was the main reason Western Province lost to the Sharks in the 2018 Currie Cup final.

But the domestic decider was far from the first time the premier Cape team has been caught short because of what can only be described as abysmal lineout work. It was a consistent feature of the last Super Rugby season, and we saw signs of it more recently in the Super Hero game against the Bulls.

There were different hookers involved in the above mentioned games. Ramone Samuels was the Stormers’ lineout thrower for most of last season, when Bongi Mbonambi and Scarra Ntubeni were both out injured. Ntubeni, who was impressive enough in other areas to still win the man of the match award, was the man throwing in at Cape Town Stadium a fortnight ago.

So that’s the first submission of evidence that it is not necessarily an individual problem. The second submission should be the quality personnel the Stormers have available to them in the lineout. Okay, so they were missing Eben Etzebeth against the Bulls, but JD Schickerling and Pieter-Steph du Toit aren’t slouches when it comes to lineout play. Far from it.

Perhaps had the Bulls misfire happened in isolation it would be possible to do what should be done, and what Stormers coach Robbie Fleck did do, after the Bulls game - give credit to the opposition. Lood de Jager, the Bulls captain, is one of the best in the business when it comes to competing in the formation, and all hookers will tell you it is hard to throw in when he is in the opposition team.

But it didn’t happen in isolation, and the Groundhog Day effect, the feeling we were watching the same record being replayed, or the same movie being rewound to start again, or we were waking up to the same day over and over again, can only lead to the conclusion that there is a serious coaching issue that needs to be resolved quickly or the Stormers can forget about their dreams of making 2019 a big year.

Of course, although Fleck laudably refused to use them, there are some ready made excuses or contributing factors that can be drawn on by those Stormers fans who’d like to write off the 40-3 defeat as just an off-day, a one-off that hopefully won’t be repeated.

It couldn’t have been easy for the Stormers to be held up in traffic while an accident was being cleared on the N1 freeway at a time when they knew they should have been at Loftus warming up and getting used to the atmosphere of the venue. Players like routine, take them out of it and they are sometimes like fish out of water. For something like that to happen before the big first game of the season, when nerves are more frayed than they may be later in the competition, has to have a big impact.

Although they have to deny it publicly, it might also be naive to believe the off-field ructions at Western Province in the early part of the year have not had an impact. It’s not about finances because all the South African franchises are cash-strapped. But if you are divided in all aspects off the field, and the Stormers haven’t even made an official announcement of their management team for the season, then it has to permeate onto the field. It is just a fact of professional sport.

But as crippling as all those factors may have been, there is no escaping the reality that the Stormers’ habit of not delivering what should be expected of them in the lineouts is a longstanding one and that until they sort it out, they are not going to be challenging for the conference title, let alone the overall Super Rugby crown that is the Cape team’s ambition.

Fleck is right when he says, as he did after Loftus, that there have been teams in the history of the competition that have started like that and come back to win it. He’s also right when he says there will be players coming back in the coming weeks that will make a difference.

The absence of Eben Etzebeth, the late pre-season injuries that ruled out Springbok props Steven Kitshoff and Frans Malherbe, plus Cobus Wiese and Juarno Augustus, had the effect of undermining the impressive depth at forward that has given the Stormers reason for their confidence.

But the bottom line is an inescapable one - the lineout woes will have to be remedied by the time the Emirates Lions arrive at Newlands on Saturday or the Stormers risk remaining where they have been for much of the past year. Meaning with their backs to the wall.