SHARKS’ APPOINTMENT TRACK RECORD DOESN’T INSPIRE CONFIDENCE
Lest it be forgotten, the Hollywoodbets Sharks team that surrendered any further interest in any silverware from this season over the past weekend, and for that matter any chance of being in Europe’s elite competition next year, will be working under a changed dispensation from July.
In the biggest change, Rory Duncan, who has both coached and served as CEO at the Cheetahs as well as some overseas clubs, is coming in as Chief of Staff, which appears to be an Americanised version of director of rugby. Or at least that is the way I understand it, for nothing around that has been completely clear. Is Duncan going to be what we know as a DOR, or is he going to be a CEO?
Given that JP Pietersen hasn’t completely erased question marks over the haste with which he was turned from being an interim Sharks head coach to a permanent replacement for John Plumtree, a lot is going to be expected of Duncan when he moves into his new position.
People who ask me what I think of Duncan’s appointment get the same answer every time: Because I haven’t had much exposure to him, I don’t have a clue. What worries me though is that, given their track record when it comes to appointments they’ve made over the past few years, the Sharks big wigs probably don’t have much clue either.
Many of the Sharks appointments remind me of the era of South African rugby that was covered in my book on the Springbok coaches, The Poisoned Chalice. As Nick Mallett noted in the book, coaching appointments back then were made by people who weren’t really qualified to do so. And because they didn’t know why they’d appointed the coach, they then didn’t know how to react in periods of crisis.
An event like the meeting of Bok coaches that was called to help Jake White in 2006 was really just an attempt to be seen by the public and stakeholders to be doing something. I felt that was what the Sharks were doing when they held their much publicised meeting to plot the way out of a crisis last October.
The only outcome of that meeting was the announcement that John Plumtree wouldn’t be coaching the Sharks beyond this season. He was the only casualty, as if the Sharks’ failings were down to one man when clearly it went much deeper than that.
I could write a book about the Sharks and their bumbling of the last 13 years, but perhaps the best example of them fulfilling a need to be seen to do something came after a Sharks defeat to the Bulls at Loftus a few years ago. Sean Everitt was the coach, there was an outcry when the Sharks lost, and a report appeared in a Sunday newspaper stating that Neil Powell, who up to then had only ever been a Sevens coach, would be coming in above Everitt as the Sharks’ new director of rugby. In one swoop Powell went from his initial designation of defence coach, a position he had yet to take up, to being the rugby boss at the Sharks.
It boggled my brain so I made the necessary phone call and was told Everitt was considered to be too soft. The Sharks needed a bad cop to counter Everitt’s good cop. Shew! That would be difficult to top, but the bottom line is that it was just one of many appointments that have made little sense.
Maybe proper due diligence has been done on Duncan, perhaps he will be brilliant in his role. But if he isn’t, and it turns out the Sharks have gambled again, it will just be another chapter along the same theme.
IT’S BEEN A DISASTER
The Sharks’ failure to qualify for the Champions Cup by finishing in the top eight of the Vodacom URC slipped a bit under the radar after the excellent performances turned in by the Stormers and Lions last weekend but some brutal analysis is necessary.
I said in my own assessment of the Sharks’ perennial failures of the URC era that it was the second time in three seasons that the richest SA club failed to make it into the Champions Cup through their placing in the URC. I was wrong. It was in fact the third time in the four seasons that the Sharks have failed to do what is necessary in the URC to make it into the Champions Cup.
I was forgetting that the season before last the Sharks made it into the Champions Cup by winning the Challenge Cup. Which was a season where they finished 14th on the URC log. But the reason they were playing Challenge Cup that year, and not Champions Cup, and therefore had that lifeline available to them was because they had failed to qualify for the Champions Cup the year before (2023).
So while next season will only be the second where the Sharks won’t be in the Champions Cup, they have actually failed to qualify through the URC on three separate occasions, with last year’s third place in the URC presenting itself as an oasis in the desert. That is just ridiculous given the players on their books and given how vocal the Sharks were about winning the Champions Cup as their main aim when they first started contracting marquee players at the time SA rugby was switching to the northern hemisphere competitions.
THE SHARKS HAVE CHANGED THEIR ANGLE
To be fair to the Sharks, the need to switch to a different contracting model has been on the table in Durban for quite a while. I interviewed Neil Powell, who’d by then already morphed from a traditional director of rugby role to a head of youth development role, before the start of the new season and a lot of what the Sharks are doing now by placing a greater emphasis on their youth systems makes sense.
The fruits are already there to see, with the emergence in recent months of exciting young backline players such as Luan Gilliomee, Zekhethelo Siyaya, Jaco Williams and flankers Matt Ramao (watch him, he’s a goodie), No 8 and already experienced captain Nick Hatton and Batho Hlekani, among others, bringing some shards of positivity in among the gloom of another failed season by the Sharks’ headline team.
And yet even that isn’t going smoothly, for there is little point in throwing your weight and focus behind developing young players only to lose them to other franchises. The first mentioned, Gilliomee, is apparently heading to the Bulls next season, and Hlekani is already at the Lions. Another promising fullback, Hakeem Kunene, has signed to play for the Bulls too.
By the way, at the time of writing, it is still only Plumtree who has left the building at the Sharks. The people doing the recruiting, and failing to do the necessary retention, are still there.
GOOD ENOUGH IS OLD ENOUGH
At the time the transition from JP Pietersen being the Sharks coach to being the permanent Sharks coach was made this column admitted to some misgivings. Given the former Bok wing was new to coaching at the top level, and the inherent difficulties implicit in being Sharks coach, a longer period of assessment was surely required. Michael Carrick has done much better than JP has since becoming the Manchester United interim manager and they still haven’t given him the permanent job.
What JP has got right though is his willingness to back youngsters, and it was good to see players with the same confidence he had when he first played as a teenager under Dick Muir take their opportunities when they came - meaning Gilliomee, Siyaya and also Williams. It is also good to see that lead being followed elsewhere, although the Bulls were hardly following anyone when they blooded the prodigious talent that is Cheswill Jooste.
It was a bit frustrating for me when John Dobson selected the 18-year-old Markus Muller into his Stormers match day 23 for the game against Glasgow to be exposed to the misgivings of conservative people who don’t understand the dictum that if you are good enough you are old enough. I remember watching Naas Botha dominating for Northern Transvaal when he was only 19 so I have always been a convert.
“Do you think he is ready? Do you think Dobbo thinks he is ready?”
That question of course being about Muller. If ‘Dobbo’ didn’t think Muller was ready and still selected him to play in such an important game for his team then I would have to question ‘Dobbo’s’ intelligence. Which I most emphatically don’t.
What would always be a worry is the hype around a young player who still has it all to do, and there has been plenty around Muller. He was described as “the best SA Schools player ever” somewhere last year, which is one heck of a claim and I don’t know how you measure such a thing given the names that have come through the SA schooling system down the years.
I never saw the Proteas cricket legend Herschelle Gibbs play rugby at school but those who did always speak of him with such reverence, and this includes people like the dual Bok and Canadian international Christian Stewart, that he must have been on a different level.
If you were to ask me about the best SA Schools player I ever saw, I’d have to answer with specific reference to a game and player I did see playing for SA Schools. It was 1977, a curtain-raiser to the Springboks playing a World XV at Loftus on the occasion of the opening of a new stand at the Pretoria stadium.
The national schools team played a SA Universities under-20 team, and they were captained by one Danie Gerber, who looked like a man playing against boys. Sure enough, four years later he was running through the All Blacks in New Zealand on the 1981 tour. Don’t bet against Muller experiencing a similar rise, and my money says he will, but at the same time we should all beware of creating too much expectation.
DAZZLING JUNIOR BOKS
The sublime skills and the mixture of finesse and strength packed into the Junior Springboks’ opening performance against Argentina in the Under-20 Rugby Championship in Gqeberha augurs well for their chances of winning that competition for the first time as well as retaining their world championship status later in the year.
There were stages in the first half where the skill levels of the young South African team was just phenomenal. They fell away in the second half when the replacements were made, but considering Markus Muller and others who are committed to playing senior rugby weren’t there, it was a great advertisement for the depth of talent coming through.
Apart from man of the match Ethan Adams, the player who caught my eye was the flyhalf Yaqeen Ahmed. The product of Wynberg has been referred to by avid schools rugby watchers as the next Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, which is a compliment to Sacha seeing he’s only really starting out on his own senior career, and I could see what those who are hyping him were referring to. When he scored his try I momentarily thought I was watching Sacha.
If you didn’t get to watch the Junior Bok game on Freedom Day try and get to see their next game against Australia. I only hope I haven’t now put the mockers on them.
VAN GRAAN HAS AT BATH WHAT FRANCO LACKS
There will be a lot of South African support for Bath when they play their Champions Cup semifinal against Bordeaux-Begles on Sunday, just as there would have been for Glasgow had they got through to Saturday’s semifinal against Leinster. Both teams are coached by South Africans, Franco Smith of course being the Glasgow coach and Johann van Graan in charge of Bath.
Smith’s Glasgow were charging in both Europe and the URC until they stumbled against Toulon in the Champions Cup quarterfinal, although it may have been the Vodacom Bulls who first dented their confidence the week before that in a close round of 16 tussle.
Why Glasgow aren’t there was discussed in this column last week, but the reasons Bath are there competing with a French Galactico club can be neatly juxtaposed with why Glasgow are absent and have stumbled in the URC too now that injuries and the toll of playing so many tough games in succession has hit.
Of course Glasgow do have several overseas players born outside of Scotland on their books, but Kyle Steyn and Sione Tuipoluto are now qualified for Scotland. It was interesting reading the comments section in The Times (UK version) after Glasgow’s loss to the Stormers and in particular a view that it is time for Glasgow to recruit more aggressively from the southern hemisphere.
Not being allowed to do so was a stumbling block for Smith at the end of last season and which I understand could have sent him home to coach the Bulls had the Pretoria club not preferred Johan Ackermann. When it comes to drawing on foreign star players Bath are not that far behind the French clubs, with Scotland’s world class Finn Russell their go-too man at flyhalf and Thomas du Toit such an influential player for them at forward.
Bath have depth too, for their narrow top of the Gallagher Premiership log loss to Northampton Saints last week was with a second string team. Van Graan opted to rest his star players in preparation for the Bordeaux trip, something Smith did against the Lions with disastrous results, with Bath arguably the only non-French club equipped with anything like the depth to push the European champions.
Push them they may, but much like I’d like to see Van Graan’s team win, I don’t think it will happen. Bordeaux just has too much all-round firepower.