Hollywoodbets Sharks coach John Plumtree admits there was an element of luck to his team’s first ever Vodacom United Rugby Championship win over the DHL Stormers, but in reality he will know there’s a lot more to it than that - and a lot comes down to himself.
Let’s start with the culture that Plumtree has created. There’s an old saying that it is the way a team defends that defines how much character they have. There was plenty of that on display against a team that Plumtree may a year ago have used as a pointer for his players when he targeted where he wanted them to go in terms of developing team culture.
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It was another of those days where, as is becoming more frequent now, the Sharks had to find another way to win and got it right. Instead of having the scrum dominance that they are used to, and playing off that, the Sharks were attacked and dominated in the set piece by a Stormers unit that to be fair seldom takes a step backward, no matter who their opponents are.
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It meant the Sharks had to rely more on their defence than they would have anticipated. They hung in and resisted the onslaught to clinch a 21-15 win that completed a sequence of three victories over the teams that have held the URC trophy - the reigning champions, Glasgow Warriors, the 2023 champs Munster and the inaugural champions, the Stormers.
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That says something about the Sharks’ growth from where they were this time last year en route to a second last finish on the URC log. And it was a perfect way to build into an Investec Champions Cup campaign that they are going into with a real hope of winning.
SMARTER CONTRACTING AND STRATEGISING
But it isn’t all just about culture and the development of old fashioned team spirit. The Sharks have been behind the Stormers in recent years not just because John Dobson has led the way with the creation of team culture, but also because the Capetonians have been ahead when it comes to smart contracting and match day selection and strategy.
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As it turns out, the Sharks’ best contracting move in years was announced the day after last season’s disappointing defeat to the Stormers, who were under-strength on the day, at Hollywoodbets Kings Park. To salve the obvious dejection of the Sharks’ support base, Plumtree chose the moment to announce that he’d signed up the Bok centre Andre Esterhuizen.
That was a major coup, and it was the presence of Esterhuizen in the No 12 jersey that was the real reason that the Sharks won at the weekend. A year ago if the Sharks scrum had been wiped out like it was in this game, the team would have had no go forward ball of any description and no semblance of any momentum to play with. They would have lost by a big score.
It is the strongly built Esterhuizen’s ability to turn bad ball into okay ball, to present at least some smidgen of momentum when there shouldn’t be any, that enabled the Sharks to get out of jail against the Stormers. The irony is that the Stormers were also after Esterhuizen, and he might well have headed to Cape Town had the Stormers used a third party to get him there.
Instead Dobson stuck with what he has, which of course does make sense if you consider the options the Stormers would have for the 12 jersey when everyone is fit - apart from the current skipper Dan du Plessis, there is Damian Willemse and Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, both of whom would be international class centres if Rassie Erasmus selected them there.
SHARKS HAVE LOOSE FORWARD MIX RIGHT NOW
The point is though that this was an instance where the Sharks gave themselves an edge with smart recruitment. And it didn’t stop there. If you were looking for another reason the Sharks were able to win on Saturday, it would be the work done at the breakdowns by James Venter and Siya Kolisi.
The decision to move Kolisi to No 8 has been particularly smart on Plumtree’s part. It has enabled him to circumvent one of the problems that cost one of his predecessors, Sean Everitt, who had to change his policy of always selecting a specialist openside ball scavenger in the Venter or Dylan Richardson mould when in 2021 the Sharks owners lured Kolisi away from Cape Town.
It was to prove a costly problem for Everitt, in the sense that the personnel changes, none of which had been inspired by himself, meant he had to move away from the game that saw the Sharks top of the Super Rugby log when Covid intervened in 2020.
By playing Kolisi off the back of the scrum, Plumtree is able to play both the Bok captain and Venter in the same back row, and the balance is perfect. Having Venter and Kolisi doubling up on the turnover work and ball slowing down process at the breakdown worked particularly well against the Stormers, who when they lost Nama Xaba to the Bulls lost their only like-for-like replacement for the currently injured Deon Fourie.
Fourie is arguably the Bok the Stormers are missing the most, and his absence was particularly costly against a Sharks side that were kept in the game in the first half by their breakdown work.
HEADSETS WERE FLYING
Still, it could so easily have been the Stormers who won, and Plumtree admitted that there was chaos in the Sharks coaching boss when Manie Libbok went over for what everyone thought was the winning try until the TMO cancelled it out.
“The headsets went flying. I was thinking about how we’d cope with this (defeat) tomorrow. Then with a bit of luck, we were back. That’s what can happen in these big games,” said the Sharks coach.
“It wasn’t perfect. The Stormers will be disappointed as they had chances they didn’t finish. But sometimes, when you create the right environment, luck follows you and you escape with a win.”
His opposite number Dobson would agree with that as his team created its own luck en route to the URC title in 2022, and there’s also been plenty of evidence already this season of what Plumtree has been referring to and what was reprised in the Stormers game.
The Bulls were one kick away from knocking the Sharks out of their Carling Currie Cup semifinal at Loftus, and the referee could easily have called time before the Lions made the error that enabled Jordan Hendrikse to kick the monster penalty that won the Sharks the final.
Last season the Sharks lost games they should have won, this time around they are doing the opposite. It is indeed, as Plumtree says, a mark of the culture that has been developed, but it is also because the Sharks have got smart where previously they lagged.