By Gavin Rich.
The Hollywoodbets Sharks have something that their next opponents, the DHL Stormers, don’t have – a two week break before they face each other in an appetising coastal Vodacom United Rugby Championship derby in Cape Town on old year’s eve.
While the Stormers have moved on from their epic win over Investec Champions Cup champions La Rochelle straight into an intense buildup to Saturday’s big north/south derby against the Vodacom Bulls at the DHL Stadium, the Sharks have their first break since the season began with their trip to URC champions Munster back in October.
It might just turn out to be a godsend for the Durbanites after they were ambushed by the Toyota Cheetahs in Bloemfontein at the weekend. The Cheetahs won 32-29 with a try five minutes from the end and while the Sharks did look impressive in their second half fightback and could reasonably use the heat combined with altitude as an excuse for their inability to land any early punches in the game, there were also several areas of their game that were again exposed.
They are currently sitting on just two wins from nine games played across the URC and Challenge Cup, with both wins coming at home against what you could reasonably term mediocre opposition – the Dragons are not one of the big URC teams and Pau went to Hollywoodbets Kings Park for their first Challenge Cup clash significantly understrength.
Arguably the best performance the Sharks have produced so far, the one that showed the path that they are on under their new coach John Plumtree, was their narrow defeat to Connacht in their first game back from their URC tour. In that match their busy, up-tempo style had the visitors on the rack for long periods but they just couldn’t finish off, with their inability to be clinical still being one of Plumtree’s laments after Bloemfontein.
Listening to Plumtree talk after the loss to the Cheetahs, it is clear what his team will be working most on before they travel to Cape Town – the set pieces.
“We could have easily won the game, but our scrum was not good enough towards the end,” said Plumtree.
“I can come up with quite a few excuses, but I don’t want to take that away from the Cheetahs, they showed great character. They clearly have some really good players here. They are well organised and really wanted it.”
“But we also didn’t help ourselves with the fixed facets that didn’t function. Our lineouts were disappointing in the first half. When we corrected that in the second half, we were back in the game. It’s a big part of our game that we haven’t got right yet. We just haven’t been clinical enough, mainly in our set pieces. Unless your set piece functions well, you are always under pressure.”
Plumtree pointed out that the set-piece was also his team’s achilles heel in the 44-10 loss to the Bulls in their last URC game before the switch to the Challenge Cup. The Sharks do have Ox Nche and Eben Etzebeth in their tight five, plus the former Pumas behemoth Le Roux Roets, but it seems that it is the depth, meaning the players who come on in the second half, that Plumtree is concerned about as much as anything else.
The one thing the Sharks should be pleased about ahead of the Cape Town game is that it won’t be a game at altitude, like their last two away games have been. And they will be up against a side that has played non-stop since the start of the season and will be desperate for a break.
On the flip side, the Stormers scrum, both their first-choice unit and their second choice, has cooked against top opposition in the form of La Rochelle and Leicester Tigers over the past two weekends, and the Cape side also appears to have ironed out its early season lineout problems. One thing the Stormers also definitely do have is depth, something they showed when they took a second string to Leicester and were unlucky not to return with the win in their opening Champions Cup game.
Plumtree states the obvious when he says the Sharks are a long way from becoming the team, he wants them to be but the need to win is now intensifying every week and the return to URC action, with the Stormers game being followed by a home fixture against the Emirates Lions on 6 January, will be a critical period in the quest to make a top eight finish.