John Dobson is on the brink of history as the DHL Stormers coach. If his team wins against the Vodacom Bulls on Saturday night at the DHL Stadium in Cape Town, he becomes the most successful coach in the franchise’s history.
It would also be the most appropriate climax to the most extraordinary of league seasons for the Stormers because Dobson is a born and bred Cape rugby person and he comes from rich rugby stock.
His father, the late Paul Dobson, was SA’s most renowned rugby historian, an internationally acclaimed rugby authority, the author of several rugby books and among the most respected referees in the Cape. He was also a school master who didn’t tolerate fools and a bloody tough taskmaster.
Mostly, Dobson senior was a servant of the game and my text to his son (John) after the Stormers semifinal win last Saturday evening was that his old man would be beaming down at him from above.
Dobson’s personality is the antithesis of his father, but their passion and love for rugby in the Western Cape are inseparable.
It just seems right that Dobson be at the helm of this Stormers campaign and that he is the history-maker when it comes to being the first Stormers coach to win an international title.
Bulls coach Jake White is an exceptional rugby coach with the midas touch for success. Wherever White has coached, he has succeeded. He is most famous for winning the World Cup with the Springboks in 2007 and a URC title with the Bulls would rank as one of his greatest coaching achievements, given his Bulls were one win from six starts in the first two months of the league.
The Bulls’ win against Leinster in Dublin last Friday evening was also a career highlight for White as a coach. Leinster had 19 Irish internationals in their match-day squad of 23.
It was huge, but if you are looking for rugby romance and fairytales, then Saturday night must belong to Dobson, whose unheralded squad have twice beaten the Bulls in the league this season.
Dobson has, to borrow a phrase from an article I read this week, turned duds into dynamite and discards into desperados who, after just three wins in their first eight matches, haven’t lost in the last three months.
Dobson has done the impossible before, when coaching Western Province in the Vodacom Cup in 2012.
Dobson in only his second season as WP coach took a bunch of kids and the odd journeyman to Kimberley to play Griquas’s grizzly and hardened veterans.
No one gave Dobson’s kids a chance and they scored a converted try in the final play of the match to win 20-18 and take the title.
Dobson would add a Currie Cup title to his coaching CV a few years later and this year his Stormers won the SA Shield of the URC.
But Saturday is Dobson’s Big Dance and, like so many of those teenage romcoms, the audience loves nothing more than when a bunch of discards and delinquents combine for the most explosive and appealing combination, and win.
Dobson took a motley crew and turned them into magicians and his prize must be the URC title.
Dobson, three years ago, told me that he wanted his players to express individuality. He wanted recognition of class and culture and, mostly, suburb.
The Stormers, he told me, are a team for the people, about the people and the product of the people of the Western Cape.
Dobson gets it.
He understands the rugby culture of the Western Cape, and he also knows its rich but fractured history. His historian father made sure of this, which is why this is a match that Dobson, privately, will always dedicate to his old boy.
The Stormers of 2022 are a team accessible to all, representative of all and playing a final in a stadium that has never barred anyone on the basis of colour.
They are a team of champions, even before kickoff.
- Mark Keohane is the founder ofkeo.co.za, a multiple award-winning sports writer and the digital content director at Highbury Media., Twitter@mark_keohane
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