The announcement that Springbok World Cup winners Andre Esterhuizen and Trevor Nyakane will be joining next season might have been a salve to some of the Hollywoodbets Sharks wounds after their defeat to the DHL Stormers, but recent history suggests they need more than names on paper to turn their fortunes around.
Make no mistake, Esterhuizen, who was a Shark before he moved overseas, is a massive buy for the Durbanites. In every possible way. They tried to bring the physical presence and go forward on the gainline when they lured former Emirates Lions star Rohan Janse van Rensburg to Durban, but that didn’t work out. There is no better replacement for Esterhuizen, and what he does, than Esterhuizen himself.
The Stormers were also interested in Esterhuizen, and he was understood to be really eager for a Cape Town move, but although they now have equity partners and can reach for the stars financially in the future, this is a time when the Cape franchise has to tighten their spending to start making some of the debt incurred by their mother union, Western Province. JD Schickerling’s expected return from Japan in July looks like being the only big signing made for next season.
The Stormers though, with their schools and the work done on streamlining the pathways, plus the Varsity Cup teams that regularly produce WP and Stormers stars, are in a different position to the Sharks. There are no major rugby universities in KZN, and while there are some good schools, you just had to look at the schools reflected next to the names on the Origin Round weekend, with the players wearing their old school socks, for it to sink in where most of the best young talent in South Africa starts out.
The Sharks would be down the list behind the Western Cape, Pretoria and that veritable rugby factory in Bloemfontein, Grey College. So there is more of a need to buy in talent, something which frankly they haven’t done particularly well for a decade now and which is costing John Plumtree in this first season back at the union he played for as well as coached until 2013.
That the Sharks have more of a contracting issue than the Stormers was reflected in the Stormers coming to Durban this past weekend without their Springbok playmaking axis of Manie Libbok and Damian Willemse and still managing to boss their more experienced opponents in that area. What would the Sharks give to have Jurie Matthee and Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu on their books?
Neither of those players are considered first choice and yet they lit up the Hollywoodbets Kings Park game with their performances as they underlined the fact that this country is better served when it comes to young flyhalves than may have been thought.
To perform in the modern world where you are playing across two major tournaments, the URC and the Investec Champions Cup, you do need to have the sort of depth currently boasted by the Stormers and the Bulls. He will argue with some justification that his results forced him into it, but if there is some criticism that can be levelled at Plumtree, it is that he hasn’t used his squad enough.
