The season so far is pretty much the ambit of this brief, for there is no distinct year anymore in South African franchise rugby in the sense that you can wrap it all into one season. And the Hollywoodbets Sharks are an excellent example of why it would be folly to even try.
The calendar year of 2025 should be looked back on with mixed feelings by the Durbanites - they contested a Vodacom URC semi final in June, which represented a quantum improvement from the season before (2023/24) when they finished near the bottom. In fact, they finished third on the final log, which was 11 places higher than they’d finished the season before.
And yet by the close of the calendar year the same Sharks team was back languishing in the bottom third of the log in what they will regard as their bread and butter competition, and that despite two successive close home wins against two rated albeit under-strength teams.
Saracens were without the likes of Owen Farrell, Jamie George and Maro Itoje when they lost to the Sharks by five points in a second round Investec Champions Cup fixture. The Sharks then went on to edge home against a Vodacom Bulls side in a seventh round URC derby this past weekend that was without such luminaries as Canan Moodie, Marco van Staden, Ruan Nortje and Kurt-Lee Arendse.
THE ‘W’ WAS ALL THAT MATTERED
Those absentees from the teams they beat won’t bother the Sharks or their supporters though for they’d got to the point in their campaign where the W in the results column, signifying the win, had become all that mattered. So are the Sharks, after two successive wins, turning their season around?
Perhaps, but the new year will tell us more, with the Lions, who have been a bit of a banana peel at times for the side that a few decades ago were known as the Banana Boys, due to visit in early January and the high riding DHL Stormers at the end of the month. Sandwiched in between those home derbies are two home and away Champions Cup fixtures and the away game against the Stormers in Cape Town on 24 January.
ALREADY A SEASON OF DRAMATIC CHANGE
The Cape side, mainly because the coaches and recruitment are in synch in a way the Sharks aren’t, has become the standard bearers in South African franchise rugby this season but if the Sharks can get over the line against them in either of the two back to back games, it will reflect progress from where they have been for much of this season. It has been a season, lest it be forgotten, that has seen some dramatic change already, with John Plumtree vacating the head coaches role so that he can mentor the interim coach JP Pietersen.
In truth though there was nothing surprising about the slow start the Sharks made to the season and it was quite clear they would struggle to get going when, about a month before the URC started, a visit to a Sharks training session revealed that there were only eight fit players at the practice. What can any coach do with so few players? Four injured players were running on another field as they continued their rehabilitation, but had the Sharks had to play a game that week, they wouldn’t have had a URC strength team.
The reason for that was because the Currie Cup was still in full swing at that point and the then coach Plumtree had several Pumas and Griquas players lined up to help out during the period his team would be undermanned because of Bok call-ups. But he had to wait until the Currie Cup was over. And by the way, that was where all the Jimmy Stonehouse rumours emanated from - Plumtree needed to court Stonehouse so that the release of Pumas players would happen seamlessly.
TOUGH AWAY START
The Sharks had a tough away tour to start the competition, with a visit to Scotstoun to play the previous champions, Glasgow Warriors, as tough a kick-off to their campaign as they could have imagined. As it turned out, they were in the game until not long before the end and in retrospect, considering what followed, they can look back at that start as a relatively positive and promising one.
However they drew with the lowly Dragons in inclement weather conditions a week later and in that game some of the problems that were to become sticking points later on, such as some really ragged defence, started to show themselves. A week later they were off to Dublin to face the reigning champions, Leinster, who just happened to be getting their Ireland international players back that week. The Boks had just finished The Castle Lager Rugby Championship so the Sharks didn't have their internationals and were predictably outplayed, although like the Glasgow game, it wasn’t by anything more than would have been anticipated.
ULSTER GAME WAS THE TIPPING POINT
It may be instructive to those looking for reasons for the Sharks’ malaise to focus quite intently on what happened next - where the Sharks’ season really got properly knocked off track was in the home game against Ulster that coincided with the return of the first choice players.
Before that the fact that the Boks weren’t playing and the rather inept Sharks recruiting that has been one of the big reasons for their serial lack of proper success always made it likely they’d struggle, but more was expected from the Ulster game, which was effectively billed as a homecoming for the big name Bok stars.
But the marketing was out of synch with reality for what was forgotten was how important cohesion is any team sport, but particularly rugby. The Sharks played the first 20 minutes of that Kings Park game looking like what they were - a team that had not played together since June and had had no more than two training sessions together.
The Ulster team they played against had mostly been together throughout the pre-season, something the Sharks obviously hadn’t been, and it showed in those first 20 minutes, which was effectively when Ulster won the game. That defeat was what pitched the Sharks into crisis mode and after a workmanlike win over Scarlets, the coach Plumtree arrived at a point after a series of meetings where he knew he wasn’t going to be the head coach beyond this season.
PLUMTREE’S DECISION WAS FOR THE GOOD OF THE SHARKS
Initially it sounded like he’d been told he’d move into a type of director of rugby role at the end of the season, but that wasn’t the way it came across in the press release. The public picked up the message that Plumtree had effectively been dumped, and it was in that grey area of not knowing quite where he stood that Plumtree began to think of the impact of all the uncertainty on the Sharks going forward.
He resolved that he wanted a Sharks man to be in charge if at all possible and he saw in Pietersen a young coach who, in conversation during that time of crisis, he quite openly said was “the one man who could do the job”. The caveat was that Pietersen might still be young in coaching terms, but once it was resolved that he could work with Pietersen as a mentor/adviser, and thus help blunt some of the massive pressure of the job and give the new coach a sounding board that, in retrospect he himself could have done with when he started his second stint as Sharks coach, it was a no-brainer.
GOOD START FOR NEW COACH
So after another disappointing defeat to Connacht, which was also not completely unexpected as the Boks weren’t available, Plumtree announced he’d be stepping aside to give Pietersen a proper chance to prove that he could be more than just an interim coach for the Sharks.
He’s made a good fist of that so far, but one thing is clear - he is going to need to get maximum input from the several marquee players and for the stars to shine if there is to be the proper upswing in the Sharks’ fortunes at URC level that Pietersen was able to engineer for the Sharks XV he coached in two successive Currie Cup campaigns.
Against Saracens the two centres Andre Esterhuizen, who was also installed as skipper, and Ethan Hooker led the way, and it may not be coincidental that one of those (Hooker) was a product of the Sharks schooling system and the other came through the age-groups. So maybe the jersey means more to them than to other players brought in from elsewhere.
And then against the Bulls it was another Bok player, although not a current Bok at this stage, in the form of scrumhalf Jaden Hendrikse who stepped forward to win the match for his team. Again, Hendrikse matriculated at Glenwood, so there are two parts in place there - a star player rediscovering his mojo and also one who has only ever played for the Sharks jersey.
GOOD RUGBY DECISIONS NECESSARY
A jersey which by the way was a bit of an odd one this past weekend. The Sharks went onto the field dressed in red, a jersey that looked more like a soccer strip. Although they won, the decision to go that route for the one-off SharksFest game may have been symptomatic of one of the contributing factors to the Sharks’ malaise, namely a lack of proper feel for the game in those who make the big decisions.
There’s a reason rugby coaches always talk about playing for the jersey, because that is what a successful team culture is built around. The Sharks won, but surely not because of the red jersey, which would have been completely alien to them, and what happens if they lose the next game wearing the usual black jersey - is it then the jersey’s fault? The jersey decision will rightly be regarded as some as further evidence that the Sharks, like Rassie Erasmus would say, aren’t making the main thing the main thing. The main thing obviously being rugby, and if the team is ever going to be successful enough to draw in crowds without the extra expense of having to make musicians a part of the sell, then better rugby decisions need to be made.
That’s not to say the extra entertainment can’t be used to supplement the rugby, and clearly this past weekend was a huge success in that regard. It just needs to be remembered what the core business is.
It is understood that there is a review or audit being done with the aim of establishing a new way forward and hopefully that will bear fruit, but right now the most important thing for the Sharks is that the team turns the two wins they have just scored into proper momentum and that will require the Sharks’ Boks to shine in the same way that they do when they wear the green and gold.
And if they are looking for inspiration, they need look no further than what Esterhuizen, Hooker and now Hendrikse have done over the past two weekends.