This season’s Carling Currie Cup has been a baptism of fire for many young players in the Hollywoodbets Sharks XV squad, but with their role in future plans, it’s vital – for the franchise and themselves – that they stand up and be counted.
Following on from his team’s loss to the Vodacom Blue Bulls on Saturday, head coach JP Pietersen expressed his disappointment at the outcome, but made it clear that there’s more to the competition for his young charges.
“It’s disappointing, 64-nil is quite a hard one to take when you’re looking for positives,” he said after the game.
“Looking at the Vodacom Blue Bulls, they were good, they got into our 22, they took their opportunities and when we got opportunities in their 22, we didn’t win our lineouts.”
Looking at specifics, he pointed out the collision area as a concern.
“We lost at the collision and breakdown, every time we got the ball, the first three balls got ripped, or we lost ball at the breakdown, so we couldn’t build. They shut us down, they were good and applied the pressure.
“They were clinical, I think that was close to a perfect game from them.”
For long periods, the home side dominated the possession, territory and attacking stats, but in the final quarter, the Hollywoodbets Sharks XV showed great determination, both on attack and defence, to show some glimpses of what the young team is capable of.
“The guys showed some fight and I believe we will turn it around. We’ll give it a full crack and throw everything into that game. As a coach, you hurt for the players and it’s hard to see your captain is broken like Nick [Hatton] was after the game.
“We never came up to Pretoria to lose. As a team we told ourselves to give it a full crack, we did try, but it didn’t work out. They were the better team.
“It’s a tough one, but we now look forward to our first home game, Toyota Free State Cheetahs at home. We had two tough fixtures away, but we can take a lot of learnings out of those games. This is how you build resilience, and the group will stand up and have a full go against the Cheetahs.”
While the results of the first two weeks haven’t gone the way of the Hollywoodbets Sharks XV, the bigger picture has been about development of future stars rather than results.
“That’s our main objective,” Pietersen reiterated.
“As we know, the Vodacom United Rugby Championship competition is a long season, you can see the Lions and Bulls have gone a different way to us in the Currie Cup.
“One of our goals is to win the Investec Champions Cup or the VURC and John Plumtree is looking for players to take on tour after the Currie Cup when all the Springboks are away.”
Throwing young players into the cauldron of fire is a tough ask for many of them, but how they respond is the real test.
“You can break a player or you build resilience and he will come through and rise again. The bigger picture is the VURC, that’s the main goal.
“We are all-out youth at the moment and lacking guys with experience, but we don’t want to bring those players in and compromise our VURC campaign. If you bring them in and they’re not contact ready, you risk injury, then you’re in big trouble going into the VURC.”
As a young player himself, having made his Springbok debut as a 20-year old, he knows only too well the pressure to perform and what it takes temperament-wise to cope at this level, at this age.
“You have to take these losses and address what you did wrong and that’s part of a learning curve about fixing things. Experience takes time, the process takes time.
“A lot of the guys last played in April and then had two weeks of pre-season for this competition and then straight into it without a warm-up game. It is challenging.”