Juarno Augustus returns to commercial and competitive territory this weekend, and Ulster’s investment in their back row is only now beginning to pay returns. The Irish province travels to Cape Town to face the Stormers in a United Rugby Championship fixture, and the 28-year-old says he is finally “enjoying his rugby again” after a summer of ankle surgery disrupted his season before it began.
Augustus spent four seasons with the Cape Town-based franchise between 2017 and 2021, the period in which his professional playing career took shape, before moving on to Northampton Saints and later to Ulster. That career path, from Stormers academy product to a contracted forward in two of the competition’s key markets, gives Saturday’s meeting a personal dimension, but he frames it in professional terms.
“It’s always nice to play against the team you grew up playing for. I’ll just try to play my game to the best of my ability,” he said. The homecoming also carries a logistical cost familiar to travelling players: demand for tickets among family and friends. “It’s nice just to be at home. I’ll probably need a lot of tickets, everyone’s been asking me!” he added.
His recovery narrative is central to Ulster’s hopes of extracting value from the trip. Augustus underwent ankle surgery in the summer and acknowledged that pre-season was a struggle as he worked to put the operation behind him. “I had surgery and I was struggling a bit in pre-season to put it behind me but it’s all gone now and I’ve had a run of games,” he said. “That’s the main thing, to keep training and being fit again.”
For a player, fitness is the underlying asset, and Ulster’s return on Augustus depends on him staying on the pitch. The same logic applies to the squad as a whole, and the numbers there are unflattering. Ulster remain without a victory in their URC campaign to date, with their 34-26 defeat by the Bulls in Pretoria extending their winless run in the competition this season to four games. Augustus, however, resists the idea of a structural overhaul.
“I don’t think huge things need to change. It’s just a bounce of the ball, just small things that we need to work on and get right,” he said.
The opposition, by contrast, present a sterner proposition. The Stormers have won three and lost one of their four URC matches this season, a record that underlines why Cape Town remains one of the competition’s strongest markets and why this is a demanding assignment for the visitors. The two sides played out a pulsating 38-38 draw in Belfast last term, and Augustus is hoping Richie Murphy’s side can go one better on Saturday, with kick-off at 12:45 GMT.
“It’s at their home this time so we need to be sharper, need to be ready for what they’re going to bring. From minute one to minute 80, we need to give it our best. That’s what we are going after,” he said.
Preparation, in Augustus’s account, has followed a conventional professional structure: coaching staff analysis followed by player execution. “They have a lot of dangerous players who can make anything happen in a second. We need to be aware of it,” he said. “Richie and his coaching staff gave us some detail on how they play and it’s up to us now to go out and execute.”
For Ulster, the trip to Cape Town is an opportunity to convert effort into points and arrest a winless start that carries competitive and reputational cost in a league where every fixture matters. For Augustus, it is a return to the franchise where his career began, in front of a home crowd that, by his own admission, has been asking for tickets in numbers. “We just need to be on our game every single moment,” he said.
The fixture preview and Augustus’s comments were reported in coverage of the United Rugby Championship, including the BBC’s article at https://www.bbc.com/sport/rugby-union/articles/c3lylzg00zg1o.