Toulouse will be more misery for Sharks as they prioritise Saracens

It was most emphatically not a good weekend for the Hollywoodbets Sharks, with the Eben Etzebeth eye-gouging incident that looks set to rule him out of the rest of the season being followed quickly by another poor performance in the Vodacom United Rugby Championship.

Etzebeth hasn’t played much for the Sharks since moving to Durban from France and he missed much of last season because of recurring headaches. But the owners, mindful of the fact that one of the reasons Etzebeth has become South Africa’s most capped player is because he doesn’t tend to have health issues when the Springboks are playing, were hoping they’d be getting their money’s worth from him from the start of December. Thanks to his brain fart in Cardiff, that now seems unlikely.

Not that the Sharks should be losing sleep over Etzebeth’s plight, because although their ego contracting is a big part of their problem, they do have issues that go deeper than that.

The smart money wouldn’t have been on the Sharks beating Connacht in Galway. But even without their absent Springboks, and of course Lukhanyo Am has now left the franchise for Japan, the Sharks had the personnel to do far better than lose 44-17, with the result seldom being in doubt in the sixth round Vodacom URC game.

Reset. Refocus. pic.twitter.com/FRdpoeTPYv — The Sharks (@SharksRugby) December 1, 2025

THE FIVE WEEKS OFF BROUGHT NO CHANGE

There were five weeks that separated this game from the one that ended the first phase of competition before the international break, when they achieved their overdue first win of the season against the Scarlets in Durban.

That was supposed to be a period when the Sharks would consolidate, when they would get in some much needed work on their game-plan, something they were unable to do in the pre-season as they were down on numbers.

But there was little evidence of any improvement or any change in Connacht, with but for a brief period after halftime when they became more direct and sharper, the attack still looking uninspiring, and the defence continuing to look porous. This time five tries were leaked. Most of the Sharks opponents have managed try scoring bonus points against them this season.

And with the DHL Stormers’ win over Munster having been played just prior to the Galway match, it was hard not to juxtapose the energy and drive, plus the obvious desperation the Stormers show as a sign of their commitment to the jersey and the cause, with the more laboured appearance of the Sharks.

It has long been thus - when the Sharks and Stormers have played each other in recent years, the Durban team has often had bigger names on paper, but the Capetonians have won the forward battle because they are more hard-working.

PUBLICLY HUMILIATING THE COACH IS COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE

So who is to blame for this? Well, it is a malaise that goes back a long way, and probably started on the day in 2013 that the board of the Sharks decided to replace a long serving and successful administrator in Brian van Zyl with someone who had no administrative experience and had just finished playing. It wasn’t John Smit’s fault, he didn’t know what he was getting into.

But the most recent mistake that they have made is inarguably the stupidest of them all - they publicly humiliated their coach John Plumtree by letting it known that he was effectively axed, but would carry on until the end of the season.

How must Plumtree, and for that matter his assistants, who must also know they are on skid row, feel about that. If Plumtree, knowing his time is done, is more motivated now by looking out for his next job in the game than what is happening right now at the Sharks you could hardly blame him.

What did the Sharks bosses think they were going to achieve by making the announcement they did apart from further undermining Plumtree’s confidence? And how do you think the players are going to react to having a coach they know won’t be there next year so he’s not the man they need to play for in order to preserve their contracts?

If a player is called in by Plumtree now to explain poor performance, he can just shrug his shoulders and think to himself that he will soon have a new coach to impress and what Plumtree thinks doesn’t matter. When you think about it, the decision by the Sharks bosses to announce that Plumtree was on his way out at the end of the season while, up to this point, not changing anything else, was just mind-bogglingly bizarre.

It looks like someone felt a statement had to be made, but all it did was make the coach’s position even more untenable, and publicly humiliate him at a stage of the season where, if the decision had been delayed, he’d be throwing everything into getting the Sharks to to perform so he could save his job.

WHITEHEAD PLAYING 10 IS NOT THE FUTURE

Right now it would be understandable if he sees little point in that, and if he is not part of the Sharks’ future he also isn’t vested in that future. Which might explain the rather bizarre (a word that frankly sums up so much at the Sharks right now) decision to bring in veteran George Whitehead from Griquas to play flyhalf.

Whitehead did win the Currie Cup for his province, but that was the Currie Cup, and he is now 36 years old. So regardless of what you think of his game, and he was at the Stormers six years ago and they didn’t keep him so maybe that says something, he is not an investment for the future.

The Sharks have the man rated as the next best flyhalf in South Africa to the top three of Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, Handre Pollard and Manie Libbok on their books. But Jordan Hendrikse is playing fullback while the merry-go-round at flyhalf continues (there’s been a change at flyhalf in almost every game).

Shouldn’t the Sharks be bedding the fit-again Hendrikse in as their game driver, with young Hakeem Kunene, who is part of the Sharks’ future, playing fullback in the absence of Aphele Fassi.

Kunene was trusted sufficiently to come onto the field as a fullback replacement against Connacht, with Hendrikse moving to pivot, so keep it that way.

WILL NEED TO BE UNDER-STRENGTH AGAINST TOULOUSE

As it turns out, with the Sharks due to play their first home Investec Champions Cup game against Saracens just six days later, Sunday’s opening European game against Toulouse in Toulouse might present Plumtree with a chance to try a few things.

The logistics will demand that if he wants to win the Saracens game, he has to have his top players back in Durban. Saracens play their first Champions Cup game on Saturday, so they will be in Durban before the Sharks will be.

But Toulouse is one heck of an opponent to go in with a second string team against, and one shudders to think about what might become of the Sharks if the hosts get any kind of momentum. It could make what happened to Wales against the Springboks last week look like a tight game.

Plumtree knew back when the season started in September that this was going to be a particularly difficult period for the Sharks. What he wouldn’t have known though was that the season was going to start so poorly that a big defeat against Toulouse won’t be seen as the aberration it might otherwise have been.

He also wouldn’t have known that his bosses would have sent him into this period effectively as a dead man walking - a coach who has already been told his days are numbered.