Jake White expects another bruising contest between two formidable front rows when the DHL Stormers and Vodacom Bulls lock horns on the new pitch at Cape Town Stadium.
Saturday’s North-South derby will mark the first meeting of the local giants on the revamped field since last season’s quarter-finals of the Vodacom URC, which the Stormers won 33-21 in the Mother City.
The troublesome playing surface had been an issue during Stormers matches since the team moved away from Newlands, and it tore up badly last season, yet the situation has improved as a new hybrid pitch – which is 50% synthetic and 50% grass – has been relaid.
The Stormers’ first game of the 2023-24 campaign at Cape Town Stadium was against French outfit La Rochelle last week in the Champions Cup, a thrilling 21-20 win for John Dobson’s charges.
Former Stormers scrum plough Wilco Louw will anchor a powerful Bulls front row as The Herd look to snap a six-game losing run in the URC against the hosts, and White is relishing the set-piece challenge.
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Speaking in a Bulls conference on Friday, the director of rugby told reporters: “The same surface that the Cape Town Stadium has is exactly the same surface we have now at Loftus, so we’re obviously chuffed that the ground and surface is what we’re used to.
“I think every week you’re hoping for a contest at scrum time, every SA side. It’s no secret that when [Steven] Kitshoff and [Frans] Malherbe were dominating SA rugby that they [the Stormers] had people expecting them to be dominant in scrums week in and week out.
“We’ve got to a situation now where we’ve got Akker van der Merwe, who’s an international hooker; we’ve got Wilco Louw who’s rated really highly as a tighthead prop in the world of scrummaging.
“And then a guy like Gerhard Steenekamp, who came back from his first Test against Argentina and was phenomenal in the scrums.
“It’s always going to be a contest in South Africa where your front row has to come up with the goods, and playing on a field that we’re now used to I don’t see anything that is going to change – I see it as two front rows going hard at each other trying to get dominance at scrum time.”
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