Baby Boks are ready for play-off
Nche, hooker Jan van der Merwe will pull on the No 2 jersey, while Joseph Dweba moves to the bench.
Jacques Vermeulen comes in at No 6 for Rikus Bothma and flanker Dan du Preez swops places with his twin brother Jean-Luc.
In the backline, Malcolm Jaer takes over the right-wing duties from Khanyo Ngcukana. No 8 Hanro Liebenberg will captain the South Africans in their fifth and last tournament outing before they return home on Monday morning.
On Thursday, Theron said he was pleased with the attitude his players have shown in camp despite the loss against tend to, Coetzee boasts the experience and the ability needed for the job.
If Meyer’s team does fall short, and that means an honourable exit at the semi-final stage (in other words a close game) would be a minimum requirement, the prospect of Rassie Erasmus, who fills the position of general manager of the Rugby Department at the South African Rugby Union, working together with Coetzee again would be an appetising one for the administration.
Erasmus was the man who first lured Coetzee to the Western Cape at the start of 2008, when he replaced Kobus van der Merwe as head coach with responsibilities effectively those of a director of rugby.
Coetzee had served as an assistant coach in Jake White’s winning Springbok management team between 2004 and 2007, and would have been White’s choice as his successor as national coach back then. However, Peter de Villiers was appointed instead, and if Coetzee does eventually graduate to the national role, the apprenticeship he served with Erasmus for two years before himself taking over the Stormers will serve him in good stead for the challenges and the pressure.
Although Coetzee has often been criticised, the blips that have coincided with the highs of his eight-year stint in the Cape will have made the pressures faced as a Bok coach seem like just another day at the office. For there is some validity in the theory that Western Province, with its politically minded and interfering administrators, is the toughest place in rugby to work.
Those pressures were something that Erasmus wasn’t prepared to deal with, which was why after three years he vacated his position. However, it was not before helping Coetzee steer the Stormers and WP in the right direction, remembering that when that duo came together the Stormers had only reached the Super Rugby play-offs twice in their history and WP hadn’t played a Currie Cup final since 2001. With Gary Gold as the other assistant and Brendan Venter and Jacques Nienaber also in the management mix, the Stormers came England on Monday evening.
“The disappointment of the semi-final is behind us and we have turned our focus to the French match. There is still one match left in the tournament and we believe it is going to be a tough test against a good French side,” said Theron.
“The team spirit is great and the atti- back from a three-game losing sequence at the start of the 2008 Super 14 season to finish just outside of the semi-final placings, with just a bonus point separating the fifth-placed Stormers from the fourthplaced Sharks.
A combination of a failed game-plan that was shown up in the first game of the season and an injury crisis saw the Stormers fall well short in 2009, but Coetzee’s WP team – he was Currie Cup coach from 2008 – challenged strongly in that year’s Currie Cup and were only just beaten by a Bokladen Bulls side in a semi-final decided by a late Morné Steyn penalty.
Erasmus realigned the management team for 2010, with Coetzee taking over as Stormers head coach – possibly to counter an offer to Coetzee from the Lions – and with the recruitment of Jaque Fourie and Bryan Habana also playing a strong hand, the Stormers enjoyed their best season.
In the seasons to follow they were often accused of being too dour and defence- oriented in their approach, but with big Sireli Naqelevuki on the wing and Fourie at outside centre they had the confidence to spread the ball to the extremities of play and scored some great tries.
Had it not been for an unexpected defeat to the Sharks at Kings Park in the penultimate league game, the Stormers may well have topped the league that season, in which case the final would have been played in Cape Town. Instead they came second to the Bulls, who won an Orlando Stadium final made controversial by accusations that referee Craig Joubert made the wrong calls at the breakdowns.
Later that year Coetzee was in charge of the WP team that played a first Currie Cup final in nine years. Although the Sharks won that 2010 decider at Kings Park, there was no denying that WP were on the right track after years of struggling to even make the play-offs, and the Streeptruie eventually got it right when they broke an 11-year drought for the union in winning the 2012 final, also in Durban.
In between, the Stormers made the top two again in 2011, but were beaten in a home semi-final by the Crusaders, and suffered the same fate in 2012, when they topped the overall log by some distance but were shocked by the Sharks at Newlands. The Stormers’ record from that year – 14 wins in 16 games – was by far the best in the five years of the conference system.
However, failure to get across the line and win the main prize saw the achievement of being the first Stormers team to top the log obscured by the criticism of the playing style they employed to do so. The fact that they never picked up a single tryscoring bonus point in the league phase was used to beat them even though the bonus points hardly mattered.
That led to a time of introspection for Coetzee and the Stormers, and the identity crisis they suffered in 2013 and 2014, when they were clearly struggling to settle on a game-plan, was arguably as much responsible for their failure to make the play-off in those years as the injury crisis that afflicted them both times.
The mark of a good coach is one who learns from his mistakes, and this year Coetzee’s management of players and the style of rugby he has coached colluded to net the Stormers a conference trophy that wasn’t anticipated at the start of the season when it was the Bulls and Sharks who boasted all the star players.
The next two weeks will determine whether Coetzee adds the Super Rugby trophy to his CV but in any event he leaves as the most successful Stormers coach by far.