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URC WEEKEND WRAP: Why Sharks and Leinster being in same boat is not weird

rugby20 October 2025 05:01
By:Gavin Rich
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It was unexpected that two of last year’s top four finishers would be the big losers in the fourth round of the Vodacom United Rugby Championship but in retrospect that Leinster and the Hollywoodbets Sharks both lost home games is not as strange as some may make out.

Perhaps we saw the warning sign the previous week when the Vodacom Bulls, laden for that game with returning Springboks, were outplayed 28-7 by Ulster in Belfast. Handre Pollard was returning to the Bulls after a long absence and had had just a few training sessions with the team. Wilco Louw, Canan Moodie, Marco van Staden, Jan-Hendrik Wessels and others were all getting their first taste of being Bulls since losing last season’s final against Leinster. That was nearly five months ago, and they were also playing under a different coach then.

Unlike their Ulster opponents, a sizable proportion of the Bulls team that played that night had not been together as Bulls in the pre-season and they had not played the pre-season games or the games played in the first two rounds of the competition. So was it a surprise then that Ulster won because they looked the more organised team?

Bulls coach Johan Ackermann is still arguably facing a challenge in re-absorbing his Boks. The Pretoria team conspired against themselves and really should have put Connacht away earlier in the Galway game this past Friday night, but in the end they had to survive two last gasp conversion attempts (the referee ordered a retake) to win by one point.

TEAMS MOULDED IN PRE-SEASON ARE PERFORMING

The team that conquered the Bulls in round three travelled to Durban in a confident mood and as a together team that has mostly been together since the start of the pre-season. By contrast half the Sharks team they faced at Hollywoodbets Kings Park arrived home from a three-match tour on Tuesday, while the other half reported for their first Sharks training of the season the next day.

If Sharks coach John Plumtree erred it was probably in disrespecting what rugby is - a team sport. It did work for the Sharks last year when they faced Glasgow Warriors in the Boks’ first game back, but unless you are the Barbarians, and the result doesn’t matter, bringing a team together three days before the game is high risk. Particularly when you are playing against a team on the rise again and that has had far more disruptions and therefore greater continuity in selection.

There was a lot wrong with the Sharks game at the weekend, both on attack and defence, but it is their lack of attacking shape that was highlighted. And rightly so, because it is a problem carried over from last season. But when do you work on attacking shape? Every coach will tell you that is something you do in the pre-season. When do the Sharks have a pre-season? They don’t, at least not one with their Boks present.

NOT EVEN A WASHUP FOR SHARKS AT END OF LAST SEASON

Plumtree didn’t even have a wash-up session with his players, which is normal practice at the end of a season, when they bowed out of last year’s URC by losing to the Bulls in the Pretoria semifinal. The Boks had to report to the national camp the day after the game, and the Sharks coach did not see them again until last Wednesday’s training session.

The disappointment in the Sharks’ performance against Ulster from Sharks supporters is justified. Like Liverpool are experiencing now, when you have big name players on your books expectation is raised. But like the Liverpool bosses are probably now realising after a third successive defeat in the Premier League, a bedding in period is also necessary. Big names don’t just come together and automatically gel.

And comparing what Plumtree is going through to what Arne Slot with Liverpool in a different sport isn’t even comparing apples with apples if you consider that in the round ball league in England the managers do work with their top players during the pre-season.

Plumtree said in his first season back at the Sharks that he had discovered that being a coach of a local URC team was the toughest rugby coaching job in the world. And it is if you are coaching a team loaded with Boks. Jake White discovered that quite quickly when he took the Bulls into the URC and it was one of the reasons why he initially didn’t contract many current Boks.

He did start bringing in more Boks later on and the team his successor, Johan Ackermann, is in charge of now has been built by White. Ackermann hadn’t coached in the URC before this season but the Ulster game was doubtlessly a wake-up call for him. Next time he has a phalanx of Boks coming back all at once he might select his team differently.

CULLEN’S LEINSTER STRUGGLING WITH SAME PROBLEM

By contrast to Ackermann, the Leinster chief honcho Leo Cullen is a URC veteran, and yet even he has struggled with what for Leinster was the fairly rare challenge of having to go through a pre-season without top players. The Irish province provided 13 members of the British and Irish Lions squad that toured Australia in the off-season, and that was the context to his team’s poor start to the competition in South Africa.

Now that he’s got the Lions available again Cullen has discovered it is hard for that to happen in seamless fashion, as shown when his team was well beaten by a far more together, and less Lions or international absentee impacted, rival in Munster at Croke Park. Like Ulster, and also like another team that is surging early in this competition, the DHL Stormers, Munster would have had most of the players on duty for them now working with them in the pre-season.

So maybe it is no surprise that those three teams have been the most impressive thus far, and inhabit the upper reaches of the log, while Leinster, so dominant last season, sit with just one win in four starts, and the Sharks, who finished third in the URC last season, sit with just one draw in four starts.

LOG MAKES INTERESTING READING

A glance at the log will confirm at this early stage that the Irish teams outside of Leinster are on the up, and that, because they are not alone in being rated teams that have failed to get going thus far, there’s no reason for either of Leinster and the Sharks to tip themselves into a crisis at this point.

The log can easily be divided as it is currently into two separate sections - there’s the teams that have won all their games or dropped just one, which apart from the Stormers, Munster, Ulster (who have played one game less), Cardiff and the Bulls also includes what is becoming a rampant Glasgow Warriors, and then the rest are lumped together with one or no wins.

For those in the bottom half the pressure will be intense to win their next games and again when the competition resumes at the end of November after the international break. The URC is a tough competition, as confirmed by the interesting anomaly of six of this past weekend’s eight games all having been won by the visiting team.


Fourth round URC results

Dragons 17 Cardiff Rugby 24

Edinburgh 43 Benetton 0

Connacht 27 Vodacom Bulls 28

Emirates Lions 29 Scarlets 18

Ospreys 17 Glasgow Warriors 42

Hollywoodbets Sharks 26 Ulster 34

Leinster 14 Munster 31

Zebre 13 DHL Stormers 31

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