Mike Greenaway
The Sharks celebrated their EPCR Challenge Cup victory at the weekend long and lustily but they will be whipped back into line for a game on Saturday that is not far off being their most important of the season.
The Bulls visit Durban this weekend and they are in fine form and hungry for a win to possibly make them the No 1 finishers on the United Rugby Championship table. If the Sharks are half-hearted and continue to bask in the afterglow of their cup win, they will cop a hiding, and that will undo much of the good work they did in the Challenge Cup.
At the risk of being a party pooper, the Challenge Cup final was between the 13th-placed URC team (the Sharks) and the second-last English Premiership side (Gloucester). It was the curtain-raiser to a Champions Cup final the next day between Leinster and Toulouse that was in a different stratosphere.
The Sharks know this and they will also be reminded by their coaching staff that they have not won a South African derby this year — they have lost home and away to the Stormers and Lions and away to the Bulls.
If the Bulls win this weekend at Kings Park that would complete an embarrassing whitewash for the Sharks. There is no doubt that coach John Plumtree will be whipping the Sharks into an approximation of a cup final mode because it is the Sharks’ last game of the year.
They were out of contention for the URC play-offs long ago and that is why they channelled their energy into the Challenge Cup.
That box has been spectacularly ticked and now there is one last game before the players can put their feet up and watch the Stormers and Bulls, and possibly the Lions, contest the URC play-offs.
Plumtree will tell his players to empty the tank one last time before they go on vacation.
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There is also the matter of the big crowd expected at the Shark Tank to congratulate the team on their cup success.
A beating from the Bulls would not go down well, to state the obvious. Also, this curtain-closing game signals the final involvement of several players in the Sharks' set-up, notably Werner Kok.
The Blitzboks legend has been a consistently good performer for the Sharks since he joined three years ago and many a Sharks fan cannot understand why his contract was not renewed a few weeks ago.
When the Sharks were struggling, Kok was an irrepressible presence and he tried to make things happen.
Kok and his superb work ethic have been the illustration of the team culture coach John Plumtree has been trying to create, and has got right in recent weeks, so his inability to land a new contract is a mystery.
The bottom line is that Kok will be playing his last game for the Sharks on Saturday before heading to Ulster in Northern Ireland and his teammates will want to give him a fitting send-off.
The good news is that the Sharks did not suffer injuries against Gloucester and theoretically they could field a similar team against the Bulls.
Their big problem area in recent weeks has been the erosion of depth at centre but at the Tottenham Hotspurs Stadium, young Ethan Hooker made a strong comeback from injury at No 13 and former Springbok Francois Venter was excellent at No 12.