Durban - Behind closed doors the Riot Act was read to the Sharks in a team meeting this week after four yellow cards and two penalty tries translated into the Stormers coming back from the dead at 19-3 to draw their United Rugby Championship(URC) game last week 22-22.
In short, the Sharks took out a shotgun and blasted themselves in the foot and what looked like being a five-point bonus point haul was reduced to two.
Coach Sean Everitt diplomatically told the media that discipline had been addressed and “will not be a problem” at the Cape Town Stadium today in the return match.
After that match, Stormers coach John Dobson celebrated the draw but for Everitt and the Sharks the result was a backward step after the high of beating the Lions at Ellis Park the week before.
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The feeling after that match — in which the Sharks scored six tries — was that they would kick on at Hollywoodbets Kings Park and move up another level, but it did not happen, largely because the yellow cards meant the Sharks played half of the match a man down, plus two of the cards gifted the Stormers 14 points in penalty tries.
No wonder Dobson exclaimed: “We were lucky!”
Everitt, reflecting on what his team has to rectify on Saturday (5pm kickoff), looked back at what went wrong.
“The accuracy of our kicking game did let us down in the last 20 minutes as we always knew we shouldn’t give the Stormers back three the space to run back at us off our kicks and we knew that if that was the case, we would be in trouble,” he said.
“We knew we overcooked a couple of our kicks. But in saying that, if you go into the last 10 minutes of the game just seven points ahead and you have a man go to the bin, it is always going to be difficult for you to get away with it. Khutha Mchunu and Sbu Nkosi were both yellow carded in the last parts of the game so that did make it very difficult for us.”
The Sharks have a shot at redeeming themselves and Everitt says the home-and-away nature of games against the same opposition in the URC is akin to a Test-match series.
“It is not unlike the Lions series we had here last year in the sense that the return game comes so quickly, and what we have to do to rectify things was obvious last week and is something we have worked on in training and spoken about at length. It all starts with discipline. You just can’t give away four yellow cards and two penalty tries and expect to win.
“But fortunately almost everything that went wrong was down to individual errors and thus can be fixed,” he stressed. “Four of the penalties were for foul play and four were offside. We were also penalised for illegally stopping the maul.”
The Sharks, though, will be without one of their chief new recruits in former Wallabies centre Ben Tapuai who has a knee injury.
Jeremy Ward comes into the team at outside centre and Lukhanyo Am moves to 12.
IOL Sport