“What is wrong with the Sharks?” I’m in Sharks country now after having celebrated a significant birthday at my timeshare in Drakensberg Gardens this week and that is a question that gets asked by everyone who wants to talk rugby in this part of the world.
As Rassie Erasmus would say, it is a positive in that it is an indication that people care. The day there are no fans asking questions is the day the Sharks should be worried. But whether there is anything wrong with the Sharks at all should depend on your perspective on what they’ve faced so far in this early part of the season.
Given the pre-season they had, and their top Springboks being unavailable, you wouldn’t have seen me advising anyone to put money on them against the Glasgow Warriors at the Scotstoun or for that matter Leinster in Dublin.
Those were two games that were always going to be a bit beyond the Durbanites, so it was really only the Dragons game of the three on tour that was disappointing.
The 17-all draw in Newport hurt them more than either of the two defeats, and there was context to it - Storm Amy was sweeping across the UK that Friday night and at one stage the rain, propelled by a strong wind, was coming into the players’ faces from a sideways direction.
There were other sporting events postponed that weekend, and given the conditions the game was played in, that could easily have been the case with the Rodney Parade clash.
Weather like that is always a great leveller, although the Sharks would have been livid with themselves for not capitalising better on their massive domination of the forward exchange, in particular the scrums.
Dragons were the wooden spooners last season but it is true that the weaker teams are often more dangerous in the early part of the campaign than later on, when injuries start to erode depth. The Welsh region has several newcomers on their books, so to me the Newport game was always going to be a potential banana peel for the Sharks.
Not that the possible early season fight of the Dragons was the only reason I gave them a chance - I also happened to be in Durban during the pre-season and saw for myself the massive obstacles that coach John Plumtree had to overcome to get a decent sized squad together for the early games.
I arrived at Hollywoodbets Kings Park on a Tuesday morning to do a few interviews before heading to the outer field to watch the URC squad practice.
I was warned that I’d be surprised how many players Plumtree would be working with, and I was - there were 10 players on the training field, with another four, including as an example prop Ruan Dreyer, doing exercises on the sidelines as part of a rehabilitation squad.
Apparently there were even fewer players before that and given how little a coach can get out of not having at least two teams at a training session, I wondered aloud if there was any point to a pre-season when there were so players.
Plumtree though was stoic, and spoke about the players he would be bringing in from unions like, in particular, the Airlink Pumas, and just said that it was the card he’d been dealt by having so many injuries on top of the Boks being away and he’d just have to ensure he had enough players to challenge in the first three games.
Now that he has called out a full strength side for the game against Ulster, with the star players returning, he must feel he has come through a particularly rough period.
LEINSTER COACH KNOWS HOW PLUMTREE FEELS NOW
Plumtree said after the Leinster game that he’d been in conversation with the opposition team’s coach Leo Cullen, who had complained about how difficult it had been for him having his British and Irish Lions out for the initial fortnight of the season when they toured South Africa.
The Sharks coach admitted that the conversation had left him a bit bemused, for while Leinster did undeniably suffer from having their star players absent, which led to them losing both tour games, it is only really in a year that there is a Lions tour that Leinster face that challenge.
“We face it every year,” said Plumtree.
Which he does. At least in the case of the Leinster Lions, they would have been phased back into training with the Leinster coaches a few weeks before they returned to the playing field. Plumtree, having only just arrived back from tour with the rest of his squad, will have had limited chance to work with his returning Boks in the few days he had available to him before the Ulster game.
The Sharks did start well when the Boks returned last year, beating the then reigning URC champions at Kings Park, but it is far from an ideal situation to have such limited time with the players.
STORMERS PROFITING FROM HAVING FEWER BOKS
Given how tough it is for Plumtree to never have his Boks available for the pre-season, something he has never been able to do and he is heading into his third season now in this stint with the Sharks, it was interesting to listen to the views of Stormers attack coach Dawie Snyman in an online press conference this week.
Unlike the Sharks, the Stormers were without just three players who are frontline Boks during the first two rounds, and then welcomed back two of them, Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu and Damian Willemse, for their game against Scarlets last weekend.
And even then, according to Snyman, the reintroduction wasn’t completely seamless as the Stormers have made a few tweaks to their game that the Bok duo weren’t exposed to due to their non-participation in the off-season.
There are several areas where the Stormers appear to have made improvements because of work put in during the off-season, and they’ve made an impressive start to their URC campaign. The Sharks can’t grow their game in the pre-season just because so many of their top players and game drivers are absent during that period.
A GOOD DRAW HELPS TOO
I thought the Bulls fell short against Ulster in Belfast last week mainly because of the number of changes that were made when coach Johan Ackermann brought back his Springboks. The Bulls dominated the early phases of the game but failed to score the points they should have and then the fact the Bulls were a team that hadn’t played together for a while started to show.
I completely disagree with their president, who tweeted that it was one of the worst, if not the worst Bulls performances of the URC era.
They were up against a good Ulster side who are formidable at home and paid for the fact that their Boks had only come back into the system a few days earlier and would not have been exposed to what their new coach had been working on during the pre-season.
But the Bulls at least had two games at home to start the competition and in that sense the draw helped them. Ditto the Stormers, who did in theory have a tough start as their first game was against the competition champions. But they started at home and Leinster were far from full strength.
The Stormers’ much better start to their campaign than previous seasons is down to the good work they appear to have done in the off-season, and not taxing their URC players in the off-season Currie Cup certainly helped there too, but they’ve also been presented with a better draw than in some recent seasons too.
They probably targeted two wins from their three tour games but if they win against Zebre in Parma on Saturday, and my money says they will, they will have a great chance of going better than that by beating Benetton in Treviso the following week and making it three from three on tour and five from five from the season so far.
JURIE SHOULD JUST BE JURIE
They won’t be playing Feinberg-Mngomezulu in Treviso has he does need to spend some time at home before heading off on tour again with the Boks, but the pre-season has helped director of rugby John Dobson with his depth, with Jurie Matthee delivering impressive performances in the first two games before being benched last week.
The problem for the Stormers now that they have lost Manie Libbok to Japan is that Matthee is a very different mould of player to Feinberg-Mngomezulu and that may be the reason there are some who feel that the Stormers have been a bit more conservative in their approach than they usually are.
You have to cut your cloth to fit your suit, as the saying goes, and there were times last season when I felt that Matthee let himself down by trying to be too much like Libbok. Matthee isn’t a flashy player but he has great attributes and should just try to be Jurie. If the Stormers are looking for more flash from their flyhalf at the times Feinberg-Mngomezulu isn’t there they can use Damian Willemse at 10.
JONES THE EXCEPTION TO OPPOSITION TO R360
That even Australia’s NRL has followed the unprecedented action of eight national unions in the rugby union code in announcing drastic measures to prevent their players from joining the R360 movement is to me an indication that the proposed rebel league is a bigger threat than I thought.
The eight nations, including South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, France and Scotland, announced in a joint statement that they would bar from international selection any player who signs for the R360. The NRL has followed that by saying that any player who signs for R360, who remain bullish about their plans and claim to have recruited many of the world’s top players, will be banned from the NRL for 10 years.
In both cases that is a strong deterrent and is a big blow to R360 plans as their proposed league is to fall outside of the international window but one top rugby figure who sees the rebel league as a good thing for rugby is Eddie Jones.
That’s perhaps unsurprising if you know how much Jones loves cricket. He mentioned the positive changes brought by the Kerry Packer rebel series in that sport in the late 1970s as something that rugby should keep in mind when considering the R360 proposals and the way forward.
“I think we need it, mate,” said Jones in an interview with The Times in England. “You think about what the World Series Cricket did for cricket. It changed the whole game from being a drab sport to an exciting game that people wanted to get involved in. And I think that’s part of the problem with rugby at the moment.”
Jones went on to say that while international rugby is thriving, the club/provincial level of the game is in trouble in most parts of the world, with Japan, the nation he coaches now, and France being the exceptions.
“Test rugby is that (interesting). But we need another level that is an entertainment level that brings more fans and more sponsors and more commercialism into the game to allow our more traditional levels of rugby to continue.”
HARD TO PARALLEL CRICKET WITH RUGBY IN THIS INSTANCE
I don’t completely disagree with Jones’ points, but find any parallel to what has happened in cricket, either many years ago when Packer was changing the face of the sport or more recently the flourishing leagues that have followed the IPL example, hard to follow.
Cricket is a more individual sport than rugby. In the sense that there is much more focus on the individual performances and accumulation of points. When AB de Villiers batted in the IPL, or Barry Richards in World Series Cricket, South Africans would have felt compelled to watch or follow their performances and globally it was easy to appreciate their skills.
However, the support of rugby strikes me as a lot more tribal than that of cricket, and a global series played out by teams that are drawn together from different nations and don’t have a tribal history might struggle to inspire interest.
For instance, if you are a Sharks or Springbok fan Eben Etzebeth being part of a driving maul that helps either of those teams in their quest to win may be seen as a thing of beauty. But I am not sure it is a thing of beauty on its own in the same way as a batting or bowling performance would be.
RUGBY ESTABLISHMENT IS OWN WORST ENEMY
The one thing that is particularly appealing about the R360, and promotes the space in which the rebel movement operates, is that the organisers appear to understand the concept of less being more.
The number of games played by players who sign up will be significantly less than is the case now, and rugby needs that. The 12-month South African season is unsustainable and it is not only this country that perhaps is guilty of pushing players to play too much rugby.
In that regard, the disappointing aspect of the announcement that the Rugby Championship will continue in the years when none of the planned tours featuring in particular the Springboks and All Blacks is, as my colleague Brenden Nel has noted, that they are sticking with the August and September window.
There was talk of moving the Championship into the same window as the Six Nations, meaning February/March, which would have solved South Africa’s problem of being on a southern hemisphere roster when it comes to international rugby but on a northern one when it comes to club rugby.
Had the change been made, it would have been a significant step towards the establishment of the long awaited and much needed global season. Rugby doesn’t know how to help itself sometimes. If there are players who still sign up for R360 on the player welfare grounds of getting more money for less work you could hardly blame them.
There would be much more of a lure to remain loyal to the establishment if the global season was ushered in to make life easier for players and the quality of the product would surely also improve.
