Not good enough but glory days may lie ahead

As the Hollywoodbets Sharks signed off their 2023/24 campaign with their Awards evening this week, their two biggest local rivals, the Vodacom Bulls and the DHL Stormers, were building up to the Vodacom United Rugby Championship playoffs. That’s just not good enough for a franchise with the wealth and star quality players that the Durban team has at its disposal.

However, the smart money should be on this being the last season for the foreseeable future where the Sharks end early and don’t feature in the URC playoffs and don’t qualify for the Investec Champions Cup the conventional way by finishing in the top half of their league.

And no, that prediction has nothing to do with their winning of the EPCR Challenge Cup, but on the 50 minutes of guts and determination that got them out of a hole in the semifinal and into the decider.

It looked like they were down and out heading towards halftime in that game at the Twickenham Stoop, where they trailed by more than a score and appeared to be surrendering all the momentum to their French opponents, Clermont-Auvergne. Clermont had scored three tries, and all that had kept the Sharks in the game until that point was the pinpoint kicking from the tee of their new flyhalf revelation, Siya Masuku.

Given how important it was for the Sharks to get back into the Champions Cup, the hole they were in was a really dark one. And yet they turned it around, they hung in and they came back to win amidst moments of unbearable tension followed by scenes of unbridled emotion.

It was all there, in that game, shining through like a beacon. It was what the Sharks have been searching for several seasons - you can buy players, but you can’t buy culture. In that period of just under an hour, their coach John Plumtree would have felt that the culture he had been trying to build had finally arrived.

Of course, that extended into what followed after the lifting of the Challenge Cup, an event which would have brought more relief surely than joy to those who know how important Champions Cup qualification was for the Sharks. As Eben Etzebeth, the captain on the night, said afterwards, the Champions Cup is like the World Cup of club rugby. Players of his standing should not be playing in the Challenge Cup.

NO CHALLENGE CUP SAFETY NET NEXT SEASON

Etzebeth was always a voice of realism in the weeks on either side of the final. In the buildup, he said he and his players knew the Friday night game was not the main final, just in case people back home were confused. Plumtree also showed his feet were rooted firmly to the ground when he said in the post final wash-up that he knows his team cannot afford another blow up in the URC because next season they won’t have the safety net of making the Champions Cup via the Challenge Cup.

The Champions Cup is a competition the Sharks should be equipped to go far in given the number of marquee Springboks on their books. But unless they actually win it, they won’t be playing in it the following season if they don’t finish in the top eight in the URC.

COACH NOW HAS MORE SAY IN CONTRACTING

The Sharks should do much better in the URC next season, not least because by the time the next one kicks off Plumtree will have had a year to rectify the failures of the past by taking a more direct hand on the contracting. He will also have become more used to the lie of the land in Durban rugby, which is much changed to what it was when he was previously the Sharks coach.

Plumtree was certainly not alone among Sharks coaches to suffer from the poor contracting at a union where there has been more of a separation between that aspect of the business and the coaching than there is at the Stormers and Bulls. The players that arrive at those two franchises are always the ones that John Dobson and Jake White respectively want. That was far from the case for Plumtree’s most immediate predecessor in the permanent head coaching role, Sean Everitt.

Since Plumtree’s arrival some big signings have been made for next season, but it might be the contracting at the next level down from the marquee players that will be a bigger determinant of whether the Sharks will make a better fist of the URC. While the Champions Cup will always be played at full strength, which is why they will be tipped to go far in that competition, the URC isn’t.

For a start, the first two games the Sharks will play next season, on the 21 September and 28 September, clash with the Springbok home and away Castle Lager Rugby Championship fixtures against Argentina. The Boks won’t be playing then and when the Sharks go on tour they are unlikely to have the services of those players either. It would be a departure from the usual practice if the Boks became immediately available so soon after the end of the Championship.

TOUGH TOUR PUT SHARKS ON BACK FOOT

It was an understrength tour at the start of their campaign in 2023/24 that got the second Plumtree era at the Sharks off on the wrong foot. Newly crowned champions Munster and perennial log winners and European finalists Leinster were their first two games of the season and Plumtree’s new way really didn’t stand a chance against those opposition away from home.

In retrospect, it wasn’t so much those two defeats that hurt the Sharks, for they should have been expected and those two games were learning opportunities more than anything else, but the defeats to the Ospreys in London and the Zebre in Parma.

Those two results were particularly damaging, and they were followed up by a narrow defeat at home against Connacht, a game the Sharks really should have won. That was a game where the more high tempo, expansive and possession orientated game that Plumtree envisaged really came through. But the Sharks didn’t make use of their scoring opportunities, and the lack of confidence after a poor tour coupled with a lack of game smarts at the death saw them lose.

That might well have been the most calamitous loss of the season as it was from then Plumtree, who was working with assistants who were complete strangers to him when he arrived, started to appear to feel an element of doubt. If he could be faulted for anything, it was that his selections were too narrow after that. It was understandable as he must have felt like he had a gun to his head in each match, but it didn’t promote the growth of depth.

There were home Challenge Cup games against rank opposition in Durban where the coach could have given fringe players a run and extended his selection net, but instead he went with the best available team in every game. That wouldn’t have done wonders to team morale, and neither would have the Challenge Cup defeat to the Cheetahs in Bloemfontein.

The altitude may have got the Sharks in that one, and the Sharks weren’t at the races in there other two games at altitude, the URC games against the Bulls and the Emirates Lions, but otherwise most of their losses were in games where they weren’t far away from winning. They were unlucky not to beat the Stormers in Cape Town but were fortunate to lose by less than a score against the same team at home six weeks later when the Stormers were missing their Boks but the Sharks had most of theirs present.

Etzebeth did miss that game though and it was noticeable throughout the season that the big Springbok did have a galvanising impact on the team. He was a smart choice to lead the side when it became clear that regular skipper Lukhanyo Am was going to be absent from the final.

MASUKU SELECTION WAS A TURNING POINT

The Stormers game, although lost, was the beginning of a turning point for the Sharks in the sense that it was in the second half of that game that Masuku was first introduced. He made an immediate impact with his greater appetite for playing near the gainline and taking on his opponents than the man he replaced, Curwin Bosch. Although a makeshift Sharks team (the game was played during Bok resting protocols) lost heavily to the Lions in Johannesburg, Masuku showed further promise in his first start, and it was also around that time that another new Sharks find, young home produced centre Ethan Hooker (a Westville old boy), was introduced to the fray.

Plumtree mostly stuck to his first choice team because he felt he had to but there was a positive point made about the depth available when a second string team was taken to Glasgow for a URC game against the Warriors (the top players were being rested for Challenge Cup playoffs). The Sharks lost that night, but then the Warriors don’t lose often at the Scotstoun, and the makeshift young Sharks team kept them scoreless in the second half and denied them a bonus point. Later in the season though a different message was sent out with the selection that played the penultimate URC game against Cardiff, where they lost by 20 points at home.

The top 20 players were unavailable as they flew that day to London to start preparations for the Challenge Cup final and the group that was left behind to face the Welsh team included several older players many had forgotten were even on the Sharks’ books.

SOME STAR QUALITY BUT REBUILDING NEEDED AT FRINGE LEVEL

With several players who have been stalwarts in the past, including Bosch, heading away after not having their contracts renewed, there is a bit of rebuilding to be done. However, there is no denying the star quality of some of the talent that is coming through, and young lock Corne Rahl is going to be a big name player in a couple of seasons.

With Masuku at flyhalf the Sharks look a lot more connected on attack, and although it is understood he may now only be arriving in Durban in January, Plumtree should also have been pleased with the versatility shown by new flyhalf acquisition Jordan Hendrikse in his last two games of the season at the Lions. He played centre in both and looked the part of a decent second five-eight as it would be described in Plumtree’s native New Zealand.

It is what happens in the meantime if Masuku is injured or, which is not impossible, he gets called up by the Boks that could prove a problem in the new season for Plumtree. Boeta Chamberlain has also left, with the Bulls his destination.

Overall though the Sharks in the recent past may have had as much of a problem around culture as any problem they may have had around personnel and their fightback in the Challenge Cup semi suggests that is a thing of the past. With some big name players arriving to add to those already there, brighter days are ahead for the Sharks.