The only surprising thing about Monday night’s announcement that the Cell C Sharks and their head coach Sean Everitt have parted ways was that it was confirmed where and when it was.
An exit in November after a home game against a Welsh club would not have been foreseen. It was more likely it would happen after a blowout against one of the bigger teams later in the season or, as was being planned, at the end of the campaign.
It was an open secret that the Sharks’ American investors wanted to sack Everitt when the team bowed out of last year’s Vodacom United Rugby Championship at the quarterfinal stage. They were spoken out of it by some of the Durban based administrators. The Sharks’ URC campaign perhaps wasn’t quite the disaster in 2021/22 as had been made out, they came fifth on the log and were unlucky to lose to the Bulls in the Loftus quarterfinal, which was won by the eventual finalists with a last gasp Chris Smith drop-goal.
CLEAR IT WAS GOING TO BE HIS LAST SEASON
But that this was going to be Everitt’s last season as coach before the Sharks brought in a heavyweight coach to front a franchise that with its American investors now has the money to embark on a ‘poster boy’ recruitment policy became clear to the Durban rugby cognoscenti towards the end of the off-season. And it would have become clear to Everitt himself when the season started that his days were numbered, for he was effectively in the process of being sidelined.
Going into the 2022/2023 season, he was no longer the front man for the Sharks. It was director of rugby Neil Powell, the former Blitzbok Sevens coach, who was initially recruited to be defence coach then suddenly elevated, who fronted the media to explain team selections. Not Everitt. Powell told us he was taking responsibility for selections. Word from around the camp was that he was very involved in the running of the team.
So there is some irony in the fact that Everitt becomes the fall guy now when on the day of blowout that cost him his job, the man who will replace him was in the coaching box with him. How much of the Cardiff blowout was down to Everitt and how much of it to Powell? You have to be inside the camp to be sure.
SOMETHING HAD TO BE DONE
Some would describe the decision to sack Everitt as knee-jerk, but that something had to be done was clear. It probably wasn’t going to be good for Everitt as a human being to spend the season effectively as a dead man walking. However, the 35-0 defeat at home to Cardiff on Sunday, which made his departure date clearer, may have cost him in the sense that presiding over a successful or relatively successful Sharks run might have made it easier for him to be transitioned into an assistant coach's role or into a role where he could oversee the Sharks’ youth systems.
It was in that latter role, as age-group coach, that Everitt really excelled, and which propelled him to the top of the queue of potential replacements for Robert du Preez in 2019. Lest it be forgotten, everything was done in haste, and Everitt was preparing for his first game as head Currie Cup coach - he had served as dual coach with Brad MacLoed-Henderson in 2013 - without having had time for preparation.
A VICTIM OF Covid
The Sharks lost to Griquas in the opening game but Everitt by embarking on a bold youth policy as he accelerated age-group players he had worked with into the senior system, managed to get the Sharks to show signs of improvement in that 2019 Currie Cup season and then carried that confidence into 2020.
In fact, if you were to ask me to sum up Everitt’s career at the Sharks, I’d forward the argument that he was one of the many people around the world who may have had his career effectively destroyed by the arrival of Covid.
On the last day before rugby was suspended in this country and Super Rugby was halted, Everitt presided over an excellent Sharks Super Rugby victory over the Stormers. That put the Sharks at the top of the log after seven games and that wasn’t a position they’d really been anywhere near since the real downward spiral in Sharks rugby started with the mid-2013 sacking of John Plumtree.
The Sharks were playing a vibrant, attacking style of rugby at the time, with specialist openside flankers playing a big role in a playing style built around transitioning from turn-overs, be it from defensive work or off contestable kicks. The Sharks scored some good wins on what was to be their last tour of Australia and New Zealand, and effectively had the hardest part of the season behind them and had seen off the two main challengers locally, the Bulls and the Stormers.
Who knows where the Sharks would have got to in Everitt’s first season of Super Rugby had Covid not intervened, but what was obvious was that the several months break changed the landscape.
With Jake White arriving as director of rugby at the Bulls, the Pretoria franchise suddenly took the lead locally, and the Sharks struggled in a poor local competition in which all the top teams played a style of rugby that matched the gloomy mood of the time. Everitt appeared to lose his way then, with too much reliance on the kicking skills of a flyhalf in Curwin Bosch who just took the ball too deep for the Sharks to ever be an attacking threat.
MONEY CHANGED THINGS TOO
During Covid there were other developments away from the field that had impact, and Everitt also arguably wasn’t helped by what happened next, which was the arrival of the American investment company MVM’s equity partnership with the Sharks after they’d been spurned by Western Province. It meant the Sharks had money to recruit top players, but at the same time the Stormers, watching from the Cape, may feel they dodged a bullet as it quickly became clear that what the WP officials feared and turned them against the investors came true at the Sharks - the owners started to take too much of a role in directing recruitment and other strategies.
Everitt was good with the group he was working with and had built up a culture that he felt would bring the Sharks long-term success. But the arrival of big name players, one of them in Siya Kolisi a player who could not be left out of the team as he was national captain, changed both the balance of Everitt’s team and the culture that had been developed.
Everitt had told supersport.com after the narrow loss in the 2020 Currie Cup final, which was played in February 2021, that his game revolved around having specialist openside flankers in the team and he’d never let his team go on the field without one. But when Kolisi arrived he had to change that balance, with a specialist openside no longer easy to accommodate in the back row. It would be naive to think that the changes didn’t also have an impact on players already in the group. The upshot was instead of being on the road he had scripted, Everitt found he was on a different road.
And the arrival of big-name players made his position less tenable in another way in the sense that he was now working with strong personalities. When Powell was appointed as director of rugby, the argument put forward by the Sharks administration was that Powell would be the much needed “bad cop” - strong coach who'd be a disciplinarian - in the coaching system.
There’s clearly no need for “bad cops” in the Stormers’ successful system, but then that illustrates a point - the Stormers no longer have the big-name players they once did. With the exception of Steven Kitshoff and Frans Malherbe, the Stormers’ stars have been developed into stars in the manner which Everitt was hoping to do at the Sharks.
The Stormers rate Everitt highly. That short but memorable run in Super Rugby made an impression in Cape Town. However, the rumours that John Dobson wanted to recruit him to his coaching team are just that. Rumours.
What is important to note though is that Everitt is a good rugby coach. Perhaps had he had the control of the recruitment process that other local franchise coaches had, and if Covid hadn’t intervened, his tenure would have turned out differently.
Hopefully in time his now broken long service with the Sharks that dates back 15 years will be unbroken, and the Sharks will find place for him somewhere in their system, whether it is bringing through the age-group players or as a senior team assistant. There was good reason why he was rated for his work at the Sharks before the hasty exit of his predecessor rushed him into the cut-throat, high pressured environment of being head coach.