It’s looking up in Sharks country

Newlands was the venue last weekend of a match which should have dispelled any theory that the South African team finishing last in this year’s Super 14 should be dropped from the competition next season in favour of the Spears.

No, I am not talking about the main match between the Stormers and the Highlanders. If anything, that Super 14 game proved that maybe it is a good thing for a team like the Stormers, with all their star players, to have a cracker under them to ensure that they play the entire season and don’t just give up like last year. Surely none of them want to have to relocate to Port Elizabeth in 2007?

Where the gentle nudge to the sport’s administrators came was in the curtain-raiser between Western Province and the Natal Wildebeest team. This Vodacom Cup game became horribly one-sided in the second half, with the Wildebeest players taking complete control to beat a strong (on paper at least) WP side by more than 50 points.

The Sharks second-string side (actually they should be almost third-string, as there is a full squad in Australia with Dick Muir at the moment) reminded us of what started to become apparent late last year. The pipeline of young players through to the senior ranks is working again, and somewhere along the line the union has managed to start building quite impressive depth.

This is important, for there was a time not that long ago where the Sharks had forgotten the basics of success, which is to ensure that there is depth across all levels and that there is succession planning in place.

I know Supersport’s Joel Stransky infuriated some Sharks officials a few years back when he lamented the apparent disarray of the Sharks feeder teams following an abysmal showing by the under-21 team. But while it did not make him popular in his former province, Stransky was on the button.

At that time there was nothing coming through, and when I phoned the Sharks chief honchos to ask them about it, they were quite open about the fact that they had taken a decision a couple of years ago to place all the emphasis on the senior team.

Of course, the Sharks do have money, so they reasoned that if they needed players in certain positions, they would just buy them. They did not see the value of nurturing them through the age-groups and other feeder teams.

But, to their credit, the Sharks admitted as long ago as the end of the 2003 season that they had made a mistake. A concerted effort was made to build up the game at youth level, to go back to the policy of the mid-1990s, which was when promising players like John Smit and Shaun Sowerby were recruited into Natal rugby through a youth programme.

Smit, now the Bok captain and a grizzled and well-travelled veteran, was in the Wildebeest team, as were a couple of players who would normally be stalwarts in the senior side.

But it is the number of youngsters coming through, and learning off these senior men, that has impressed, and Sharks coach Dick Muir has to take a lot of credit for his willingness to back the young talent. Sometimes it appears he throws players into the deep end, but they are all picking up valuable experience which could make the Sharks a powerhouse of not only South African rugby, but maybe southern hemisphere rugby, in a couple of years.

I don’t expect the Sharks to finish last of the South African teams, that should be the Cats, but they are in the zone. Given that they are working towards a long-term goal which would undeniably strengthen South African rugby, it would be counter-productive to the game in this country if the Sharks were to have their development halted by exclusion from the competition.

The Sharks have been criticised for a number of things in recent years, but they also deserve to be credited for spotting their mistakes and resolving to make them right. The appointment of Swys de Bruin, a coach who should be guiding the fortunes of one of the bigger provinces rather than taking charge of a feeder team, was also a good move that is now paying dividends.

And word from Durban is that the appointment of Rudolf Straeuli as commercial manager of the playing side, essentially a Director of Rugby in all but name, has worked out much better than some critics suggested it would at the outset. Straeuli guided the Sharks to a Super 12 final in 2001, and maybe he will be there to see them go even better sometime in the next couple of years.