PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA - MARCH 14: Adré Smith of DHL Stormers lands with the ball during the United Rugby Championship match between Vodacom Bulls and DHL Stormers at Loftus Versfeld Stadium on March 14, 2026 in Pretoria, South Africa. (Photo by Gallo Images)
The Stormers will be looking to improve their game even more when they take on Welsh side, the Dragons, in their United Rugby Championship (URC) match at the Cape Town Stadium on Sunday afternoon (kick-off 3pm).
The Cape side ended a three game losing streak over the past weekend when they upset an in-form Bulls team with a bonus point win at Loftus, but forwards coach Rito Hlungwani said that the team still wanted to do even better.
They are thus targeting a big performance against the Dragons, as they look to build up some vital momentum down the business end of the competition.
“We want to see improvement. We thought that a lot of the facets in the game last week were good. But if we want to win the competition there are still a lot of things that we want to do better,” explained Hlungwani.
“We thought our scrum was good, but technically Brok (Harris, scrum coach), still challenges the boys to improve. With our lineouts and mauls we felt we could have done a bit better with our conversion rate.
“So there are still things that we are working on, and like we always challenge the players, no matter who we are playing, we always want to do better.”
Top four battle
The Stormers are in a massive battle at the top of the URC log for a place in the top four, with them in second place, level on points with Ulster and Leinster, while Cardiff trail them by one and Munster trail them by two.
They thus know how important bonus points are during their end of season run in, but Hlungwani says that isn’t a focus of theirs, as it could take away from their performance.
“From our point of view every single game we want to go for the win. That is our mindset at the moment. We aren’t looking at certain games and saying we can go easy on some and hard on others. We want to challenge ourselves to go for the win in every game,” said Hlungwani.
“The focus is not on bonus points at all. I always sound like a broken record, but the big focus is on how can we get better, how can we execute better, and if we get those small things right, we feel the result will be looked after.
“So those are the controllables from our point of view. Pushing the players even more, looking to improve certain parts of our game, and then eventually we will get what we want out of that.”
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