Sharks must just play in the V

There were some interesting theories being bandied about beneath the braai smoke hanging over the Kings Park outerfields on Saturday night about the factors that conspired to produce such a rank poor Sharks performance against the Bulls.

To me it wasn’t a one-off, it has happened too often for the Sharks’ demise against a fellow South African team to be written off as something that might have been caused by the date or the timing of the match.

But who knows, maybe those who tempered their disappointment at the Sharks’ performance with unbounded joy that they were still on the planet, and human-kind hadn’t been extinguished by a deity who fixed things according to mathematical calculations, have a point.

I can vouch that the sun did come up from behind the eastern horizon on the Indian Ocean on Sunday morning, so it looks like all that Camping stuff was wrong. The world did not end at 7pm on the 21st of May 2011.

But what if some of the good Christian boys in the Sharks side had taken Camping’s predictions too seriously? Should we blame them for misfiring against the Bulls if they spent the week expecting the world to be extinguished exactly 10 minutes before the scheduled kick-off?

It would be understandable if to some Sharks players, Bakkies Botha was just an after-thought this time, with the thinking going along the lines of “Let’s worry about Bakkies only if the clock strikes 7.01pm and we are still here”.

But looking for reasons why the Sharks have not managed a bonus point in any of the three crunch derby matches against the Stormers and Bulls this season is going to have to require a bit more science and realism in the examination process than goes into most of the end of the world theories.

Those theories may all be based on misconception, so it is apt that my own examination of what is ailing the Sharks starts at my own misconception. My money said the Sharks would win against the Bulls because the Bulls forward pack isn’t what it used to be and as such they wouldn’t be able to do what the Stormers did by preventing the Sharks from playing by just out-muscling them.

The prediction of a Sharks win was based almost entirely on what happened last year, when the Sharks aped the All Black approach and came close to running the Bulls off their feet before the rain came down in the 2010 Currie Cup semifinal. Some of the overseas sides have shown how vulnerable the Bulls can be to a wide game, so why not the Sharks?

But sometime during the Kings Park mauling it dawned on me that the perception of the Sharks as a team that can run opposing sides off their feet is actually a misconception based entirely on history and not on current reality.

The Sharks did excel at their busy, possession orientated approach last year but that was then. Last August, September and October the referees were aiding that style of rugby by penalising the defensive team more than the attacking one at the breakdown. That is something that has been balanced out this season under the directive of the IRB.

It is more than that though, for there are reasons why the Sharks cannot get right what some others are. One of those may be the predictability that comes with too much reliance on the three big ball carriers – Bismarck, Willem Alberts and Jean Deysel since his return – to get the side across the gain-line, which is an imperative for their game to work. As it is always those guys the Sharks look to, maybe it is not a surprise that Bismarck and Alberts have spent most of the recent derby games being gang tackled.

Patrick Lambie is a player who undeniably has the X-factor but he is not the unknown quantity to opposition teams now that he was when he made the initial switch from fullback to flyhalf in what was his first season of big rugby. Just recently the opposition sides also seem to be targeting him as someone to run at and while generally he has tackled well he has slipped some crucial ones in the derby fixtures.

And when the team selection dictates that the man standing next to Lambie is Adi Jacobs, then that area does become an Achilles heel defensively. Sharp though Jacobs is on attack he has never really been a physical enough obstacle to opposing teams to be an inside centre.

But perhaps the biggest problem of all for the Sharks is that they may be similar to me in that they have too clear a vision of what they did last year in their minds. In the quest for that Holy Grail they may have got ahead of themselves by neglecting the attention to detail and the little things that made that game work before.

Perhaps as they head into the last four matches of the season the Shark coaching staff would do themselves a favour if they forgot about last year and reverted to that old cliché about the need to go back to basics. Their winning style from 2010 is not going to work if players are knocking on balls, if the forwards aren’t winning the collisions and if the lineouts are a shambles.

Like a batsman who finishes one season in such good form that he feels he can try just about anything at the start of the next one only to be punished for not playing straight, the Sharks have reached a juncture where they need to play in the V. The flashy stuff will never happen for them again if they don’t.