The crowd responded to its home heroes. Former Wales captain Gwyn Jones believes the Stormers were affected by the raucous atmosphere.<\/p>\n
“You could see it in the Stormers players’ faces,” said Jones.<\/p>\n
“They were rattled and had no answers.”<\/p>\n
Stormers head coach John Dobson warned his players about the Arms Park cauldron, but they could not tame the vociferous home support.<\/p>\n
Dobson had also stated pre-match he was a lover of Welsh rugby and admired the entertainer Max Boyce.<\/p>\n
At one point, one of Boyce’s most notable songs, Hymns and Arias, was belted out by the Cardiff crowd.<\/p>\n
Boyce also had a famous saying to commemorate special occasions. A simple term. “I was there”. <\/p>\n
The Cardiff fans will be glad they were. Dobson and his Stormers? Not so much.<\/p>\n
Stormers could yet host Cardiff in the quarter-finals in Cape Town and the South Africans will be a different proposition at home. That is for another day at the end of May.<\/p>\n
Cardiff head coach Van Zyl admits this Arms Park epic experience against some of his fellow countrymen was one of the highlights of his career<\/p>\n
“Coaching-wise that will be up there,” said van Zyl.<\/p>\n
“It was unbelievable for so many reasons.<\/p>\n
“If you look at performances of so many individuals, it was massive.<\/p>\n
“The boys defended well, fought for the jersey and fans responded to that.<\/p>\n
“It was a backs against the wall, a big pressure game we needed to win against a great Stormers team.<\/p>\n
“So for the boys to step up, and give that performance, was so pleasing.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The crowd responded to its home heroes. Former Wales captain Gwyn Jones believes the Stormers were affected by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":588434,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5903,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-588433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-rugby","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=588433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588433\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/588434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=588433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=588433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=588433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}