Stormers' demise: Crunching the numbers
ANALYSIS: Exeter Chiefs dominated the pride of South Africa when they beat the Stormers (42-17) with a commanding performance in their Champions Cup quarterfinal at Sandy Park at the weekend.
The 2020 champions bossed proceedings, while the European debutants, the Stormers, struggled to find their feet away from their Cape Town fortress.
Second-half tries by Damian Willemse, Suleiman Hartzenberg and Marvin Orie gave the visitors’ scoreline some respectability.
However, diving into the match statistics and overall tournament data reveals a few interesting aspects of the South African team’s demise.
Damian Willemse made the most carries (18), 90 carry metres and 28 metres in contact in the quarterfinals, while he also beat the most defenders (nine).
In his six European matches, Willemse made 81 carries (placing him in the top three), racked up 401 metres (also third on the overall stats), beat 22 defenders (third) and made 12 offloads (third).
However, the real difference is what was missing, not what the Stormers had or produced against Exeter.
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The absence of master poacher Deon Fourie – 12 turnovers in five games, second most – left it up to his teammates to stem the flow of Exeter possession in the quarterfinal.
Forwards Marvin Orie (18), Frans Malherbe (14), Steven Kitshoff (13), Joseph Dweba (12) and Ernst van Rhyn (10) spent so much time making tackles that they struggled to assert themselves in any other aspect of the game.
Kitshoff (two) and Joseph Dweba (one) made brave attempts at plugging the turnover gap left by the injured Fourie’s absence, but just could not stem the tide.
Exeter, with 56 percent possession, forced the Stormers into 148 tackles (to go with the 24 missed tackles – a success rate of 86 percent).
The Chiefs also won 12 turnovers, while the Stormers coughed up possession 16 times through errors.
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