Hurricanes' coach Mark Hammett believes his team will have to adapt quickly to referees' application of the laws.

The Stormers beat the Hurricanes 39-26 at Newlands on Saturday in a match in which the visitors suffered three yellow cards, a white card, a penalty try, and a penalty count that went 18-9 against them.

Hammett was happy with the effort and courage offered by his team - which included seven players making their Hurricanes' debuts - but he concluded: "Ultimately at the end of the day it was a disappointment.

"Whether we felt we were hard done by or not, we are going to have to adapt [to the referee] and adapt quickly. We'll check the videos and come back from that."

He quipped that the Hurricanes having had all three props in their match squad sin-binned would no doubt be the subject of a trivia question one day.

However Hammett, a 29-Test cap All Black hooker and former Crusaders assistant coach, was relatively upbeat after the match.

"There were a lot of positives. Everyone saw what a gutsy group this is and we scored points when we were down."

The young players had learned a lot, he believed, had come back strongly, and might have been a point ahead at 30-29 had a TMO decision gone the other way. But he felt they had then "started playing a bit too much footy".

The only way for the youngsters to learn was by playing Super rugby, the coach said. They would have benefited from having played this game and would now be better prepared for the game against the Lions in Johannesburg on Friday.

The team had not always been clinical "but the effort was fantastic", and the seven debutants had all done well.

"We've got a very exciting young group and that's what we'll work on this week," he said. 

He had high expectations for this group of players, emphasising: "We plan to win; we don't plan to get close."

However the first principle of rugby was possession and he regretted that they had struggled in that area. The Stormers had a world class line-out and driving maul from line-outs - in Hammett's opinion "potentially the best in the world".

"We gave it everything to stop that drive but it wasn't enough."

Hammett believed the Hurricanes had scrummaged very well in the pre-season while the Stormers had been heavily penalised in scrums in their pre-season matches.

"It just felt like any 50-50 call went against us at scrum-time. But the referee may have been spot-on so we need to go look at the videos, and if that was the case, adapt and fix that."

Hammett wished Stormers captain Schalk Burger a quick recovery from the knee injury he suffered early in Saturday's match. "Schalk is very well liked in New Zealand so hopefully he is okay," said the coach.

He had been impressed by Burger's replacement, Siya Kolisi. "We thought he was outstanding pre-season and a real danger and they didn't really miss a beat when he came on."

Hurricanes captain Conrad Smith was happy that "we picked ourselves up off the canvas a couple of times".

"I've been in that position with sides before here. You're put under a lot of pressure and the crowd make themselves known, and it all builds up against a team, but I thought we showed good spirit and fight and scored even when we had a man down.

"We actually played some pretty good footy even when it looked like the opposition were getting all the play.

"At 23-9 down I didn't know what to expect with this new group, but they did come back and play some good footy."

On the yellow cards and penalties, Smith commented: "It was just frustrating the way it was sucking the life out of us. I felt like we kept getting up and it just kept happening. I thought we did really well considering, but ultimately it was just too much to play with players down and the way penalties mounted up against us."

Smith was liberal in his praise of the Stormers driving mauls from line-outs. He had asked his forwards to keep changing tactics to try various ways to stop the drive - for which they were heavily penalised - but he stressed: "If we did nothing they were driving us 30 metres. We thought it was legal but whether it was or not I don't know. We couldn't just stand there and let them drive."

By Len Kaplan at Newlands