IF CONNACHT WERE hoping for an easy away day as a pick-me-up following last week’s no-show in Ulster, then they came to the wrong place.
The Stormers won 11 out of 12 – including three play-off matches en route to the URC title – at home last year, are currently on an 11-game winning streak in the competition, and have their top points scorer from last year, Mannie Libbok, manning the controls.
On the face of it then, this has all the makings of a slaughter (kick-off 1.30pm live RTE), but that’s an assumption we have wrongly made before about Connacht. With Andy Friend’s side, good performances often follow bad ones, or vice versa.
Last year, inconsistency was a byword for them. They finished 11th and yet defeated three of the four semi-finalists, including today’s opponents, the defending champions.
But Connacht also lost at home to the Dragons and Glasgow – the two results that, in effect, stopped them reaching the play-offs.
So it depends which Connacht shows up, the one that can thrill their fans and put 30-plus points on stellar opponents, the Bulls, Ulster and Stade Francais, or the Connacht that presses the panic button at the first sign of trouble.
That was the Connacht that lost by 26 points in Belfast last weekend. It was also the Connacht that lost at home to the Dragons, who last season were hammered 56-8 by Edinburgh, 45-8 to Leinster.
It’s a bad sign that they seem to need a defeat to get their juices flowing but short-term, it bodes well for this weekend. “We can be better than that,” Friend said after last Saturday’s shocker in the Kingspan.
No doubt they can. In reality, the two Connachts are easily identifiable.
They may have 12 internationals on their roster – 10 Irish, one Scottish and one Tongan – but only four of those have more than 11 caps, and only five, Bundee Aki, Mack Hansen, Finlay Bealham, Dave Heffernan and Jack Carty have a chance of being picked by Andy Farrell for next year’s World Cup.
When that quintet are available for Connacht – which is rare enough during international windows – then they are impressive, the side that chalked up wins over Ulster, Bulls, Stormers, Stade, Munster last year, who ended the season with three wins out of four, including a rare European victory on South African soil.
Significantly four of those five are in the match-day squad today – injury ruling Carty out – while the return of Denis Buckley to their front row and Cian Prendergast and Jarrad Butler to their back-row just gives them a steelier look.
Better again is the strength of their replacements. Those were words we never wrote about Connacht last season but with Heffernan and Aki joined on the bench by ex-Leinster pairing, Peter Dooley and David Hawkshaw, not to mention former Ireland scrum-half, Kieran Marmion, and potential future international, Oisin Dowling, you get a sense the Connacht we see this afternoon will be unrecognisable from the team that stuttered their way through last week’s game, delivering the fewest passes of any side on the opening weekend of the competition.
The Stormers have two debutants, Suleiman Hartzenberg and Clayton Blommetjies, and most likely have enough about them to win. But they won’t get it as handy as Ulster did.
DHL Stormers: Clayton Blommetjies, Angelo Davids, Suleiman Hartzenberg, Dan du Plessis, Seabelo Senatla, Manie Libbok, Paul de Wet, Ali Vermaak, Andre-Hugo Venter, Brok Harris, Ernst van Rhyn (CAPT), Marvin Orie, Junior Pokomela, Hacjivah Dayimani, Evan Roos
Replacements: Chad Solomon, Kwenzo Blose, Neethling Fouche, Adré Smith, Marcel Theunissen, Willie Engelbrecht, Godlen Masimla, Sacha Mngomezulu
Connacht: Oran McNulty, John Porch, Byron Ralston, Tom Farrell, Mack Hansen, Conor Fitzgerald, Caolin Blade, Denis Buckley, Dylan Tierney-Martin, Finlay Bealham, Josh Murphy, Niall Murray, Cian Prendergast, Jarrad Butler (CAPT), Paul Boyle
Replacements: Dave Heffernan, Peter Dooley, Jack Aungier, Oisín Dowling, Shamus Hurley-Langton, Kieran Marmion, Bundee Aki, David Hawkshaw
Referee : Gianluca Gnecchi (FIR, 17th league game)
