There have been times this season when Hollywoodbets Sharks coach John Plumtree might have questioned the decision to give it a full go in the Carling Currie Cup playoff phase last September.
Injuries sustained in what doubled as a pre-season warmup played a role in undermining the Sharks in the early parts of their Vodacom United Rugby Championship campaign and were one of the things that impacted on the mini-crisis around injuries sustained in mid-campaign.
But one thing going to Loftus to dig deep over 100 minutes in the domestic semifinal did was give them experience of going to extra time in a playoff game. Plumtree admitted that helped his men when they had to do the same thing against Munster in this past weekend’s URC playoff game at Hollywoodbets Kings Park.
Although he was understandably disappointed that his team didn’t convert playing that extra 20 minutes the right way into points, with the Sharks dominating territory but just unable to get across the line, the hosts didn’t give Munster a scoring chance.
So it all went to a penalty shootout and the Sharks coach was not the only person afterwards who admitted that the dramatic and tension wracked finish to the game was extremely testing to his cardiac capacities.
So much so that he wasn’t prepared for my question afterwards, which was directed towards the fact that another way the Currie Cup helped the Sharks was that it gave them experience of what they have to do next.
Which is to follow up a 100 minute fatigue sapping playoff game with a winning performance in another playoff game a week later. The Sharks went on from their extra time win at Loftus to beat the Lions in Johannesburg in the Currie Cup final through a last gasp monster penalty from Jordan Hendrickse.
“Mate, just give me a chance to recover from this, I haven’t thought about next week. I am just trying to get my wits back about me after that incredibly stressful finish,” grinned Plumtree.
COACH KNOWS HOW TO MANAGE THE WEEK
He continued though to say that he would have to ease off in training, something he did before the domestic final, and the Sharks won’t be out training on the Kings Park outer-fields on this warm Monday which is set to see the temperatures in Durban climb into mid twenty territory.
In a nutshell, the Sharks have done this before, they will know how to manage their output this week, so while on the face of it the Bulls have an advantage in the sense that they only played 80 minutes to beat Edinburgh, the Sharks have the confidence that comes from their previous experience.
More than that, going into extra time and into a penalty shoot out will have further strengthened a temperament that has seen them make a habit of winning close games.
There’s a refusal to lose about the Sharks, such as when they came back from being 21-10 down in normal time against Munster, that should give them great confidence as they head to a venue where they have prevailed twice already this season in highly pressured circumstances and this time arguably with by far the strongest team they can select. In both the previous games the Sharks were under-strength.
There were some mistakes made by the Sharks that could have cost them. The scrum penalty that they kicked to take the lead in the third quarter should arguably have been scrummed again as Munster were bound to lose a player to a yellow card if they scrummed illegally again.
It was during a period of sustained Sharks pressure. And of course a seven pointer would have been better than three.
And then they went the other way four minutes into extra time when they were awarded a penalty in a kickable position and kicked for touch. In an extra time situation, it would make sense to kick everything to the posts as when you get that far it means it is a game of fine margins and will end that way.
In Eben Etzebeth’s defence, Jordan Hendrickse, the Sharks’ long range kicker, had a gammy thigh and might not have had the distance. But it was worth a go.
But if those were mistakes they would have been learned from and absorbed by the time the Sharks get to Loftus, where they might feel they have less to lose than their opponents and yet will have a steely resolve driven by their phalanx of players that have World Cup successes and multiple triumphs in close playoff games behind them.
AM WILL BE BETTER FOR HAVING HAD A GALLOP
There are players who could be much better at Loftus than they were in Durban. Lukhanyo Am for one. He was just coming back from injury so by his standards was relatively anonymous, but would have been helped by having a gallop. And as for Etzebeth, he spoke during the week about how great it was for him to get 80 minutes against Scarlets - now he has gone 100 minutes.
Bradley Davids, who was lauded by his coach for his BMT in kicking the penalty shoot out winner after sitting on the bench for 99 minutes, probably won’t be in the starting line-up to be a frontline kicker, but the other kickers will feel they survived a massive test of nerve too and that should help them if either of the two brothers, Jaden or Jordan, are required to kick a clutch kick at Loftus.
The Sharks were pretty poor at the start and Munster bossed the quarterfinal early but as the game progressed so the Sharks grew into their game and gained more momentum. To the point that expecting them to finally hit their straps as a collective over 80 minutes appears a realistic expectation.
“We didn’t play particularly well in the first 20 to 30 minutes of the game, but then we got on top,” said Plumtree.
“We had a couple of bad moments when they got 21-10 up and then we just clawed our way back into the game.”
That’s what the Sharks do. It’s why while the Bulls also developed a winning habit, the Durbanites now have a great chance of turning their first appearance in a URC semifinal into a passage to a first final.