For the love of the Sharks

In 1991, when the Natal team was due to play Free State in an important Currie Cup game, it took the side the best part of a week to get to Bloemfontein.

That was because the coach, Ian McIntosh, was of the view that his men needed to acclimatise to the higher altitude. So they bussed it to Bethlehem, where they went into camp for a couple of days before proceeding through to Bloemfontein the day before the game.

It was because of this attention to detail that McIntosh was regarded as being ahead of his time. In 2007 Dick Muir is also ahead of HIS time – for last Saturday’s game against the Cheetahs, the Sharks flew out of Durban at 11am, just six hours before kick-off. The modern thinking of course is that if you can’t be at altitude more than a week before, go up on the day of the game instead.

Quite clearly Muir doesn’t have fond memories of those days spent in Bethlehem, and anyway, the Sharks had to play the Crusaders in Durban the week before, so a training camp of more than seven days duration in the Eastern Free State was out of the question.

There are other massive dissimilarities between 1991 and 2007. When McIntosh took his team to Bloemfontein 16 years ago, the management was made up of himself, manager Pat Mun-Gavin, chief selector Piet Strydom, a biokenticist and a team doctor. On the latest trip to Bloemfontein we had Muir and a whole army of different coaches to reflect the high degree of specialisation demanded in the professional era.

I remember that trip to Bloemfontein in 1991 well because it was my first away trip as a rugby reporter (I was working then on The Natal Mercury). I hitched a lift with the Natal Supporters in their bus. There were about 90 of them, and the trip up and the night in Bloemfontein was raucous, to say the very least.

I live in Cape Town now so I made my own way to Bloemfontein last weekend, but the Supporters Club bussed their way to the game, just as they had all those years before. Only this time, there was not just one bus, but a couple of them, and the group numbered nearly 300.

But it was not just by bus that hard-core supporters got to Bloem to see their team score their best win of the season. There were 100 supporters who forked out just over R1 500 to fly with the Sharks on their charter. This included lunch, and they were back on the plane, after a short detour to the Bloemfontein Sharks Supporters club at Old Grey, at 9.30pm that evening.

I wasn’t on the plane, but I can imagine, from the way the guys were enjoying themselves in Bloemfontein, that quite a few liquid refreshments were consumed on the bumpy night-time flight back over the Berg.

While the volume of supporters travelling, and their mode of transport, may have changed in the past 16 years, it was evident from the weekend that one thing that hasn’t changed is the family spirit that has been a Sharks strength in their better years.

Among the supporters who flew up for the game were McIntosh himself, that famous winger of yesteryear, Tony Watson, former captains Gary Teichmann and Wayne Fyvie, and countless other names and faces that have been an integral part of the Natal rugby family both on and off the field over the past few decades.

What was most impressive of all, however, was the way the Sharks officials and players interacted with their fans after the match. Like they do in Cape Town and other centres where they play away games, the squad headed to the local Supporters Club, where they engaged with supporters in an amiable, personable way.

No request was too much for them, and there was much clicking away of cameras as the Sharks players made themselves available for the snapshots that will probably take pride of place in living rooms and bars for years to come.

Okay, so the Sharks are riding the crest of a wave at the moment, and maybe it isn’t quite like this in the bad years, but full marks to Dick Muir, Rudolf Straeuli and the rest of the management for their out-reach efforts and the way they have obtained buy-in from both the Sharks old boys and the public.

Natal’s first Currie Cup-winning captain, Craig Jamieson, said in 1990 that the success was down to the family spirit in the team and administration. On the weekend’s evidence, nothing much has changed.