It has been 18 months since John Plumtree began his second stint at the Sharks, and it will be 18 more before his plan for his beloved team matures into what he first envisaged.
Plumtree coached the Sharks with distinction between 2008 and 2012, during which time they reached two Super Rugby finals and won two Currie Cups when the domestic competition was still world-class. Plumtree was previously Dick Muir’s assistant when the Sharks (unsuccessfully) hosted the 2007 Super Rugby final against the Bulls.
The big Kiwi’s second coming did not start with the success he would have wanted, as he discovered a Sharks setup that was hardly geared toward consistent winning. Plumtree has said that he found a group of players disconnected from each other. The lack of team culture was a stark contrast to the halcyon days of the Natal team of the ‘90s, in which Plumtree featured as a robust flank.
Plumtree was on the field when Natal won the 1990 Currie Cup final before a disbelieving Loftus Versfeld crowd. The Durbanites had apparently no right to win that game because Naas Botha’s Northern Transvaal were supposedly in a different league from the Cinderellas of the east coast. Yet, Natal won the Cup for the first time after 100 years of trying.
The reason why captain Craig Jamieson and coach Ian McIntosh’s team shocked the mighty Blue Bulls was that they were a tight-knit group of mates. They played for each other when the chips were down. The Bulls had fatefully pre-bottled champagne with labels heralding the “1990 Currie Cup champions of Northern Transvaal,” and those bottles that were not immediately destroyed became collectors’ items.
Plumtree never forgot that precious “mateship,” as they call it in Australia, and he learned more about it during coaching tenures with Swansea, Ireland, the Hurricanes, and the All Blacks.
When he returned, Plumtree found a listless, disjointed Sharks setup. The players and coaching staff were unsure of the team culture he wanted and had little idea of how to build it.
Sharks fans need no reminder that, this time last year, the team was second-bottom in the United Rugby Championship (URC) and had sunk to the point of giving Zebre their first win in four years. They finished well outside the play-offs, but much of Plumtree’s philosophy about connectivity and team-first values began to take root. A disastrous URC campaign gave way to a Challenge Cup victory against Gloucester at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London.
Since then, the Sharks have won a Currie Cup and, more recently, the SA Shield, awarded to the best-performing South African team in local URC derbies.
The latter trophy was won a week after the Sharks suffered a miserable defeat to the Lions at Ellis Park — an especially bitter pill to swallow after their heroic 13-man victory over the Bulls in Pretoria.
It is fluctuations like these that Plumtree recognizes as signs of a team that has not yet reached maturity. To be fair to the coach, he had warned his players in the week leading up to the Johannesburg game that it was a potential banana skin.
But, as any parent will testify, words of warning often fall on deaf ears, and going through the fire is often the best way to achieve wisdom.
At the halfway mark of his three-year tenure at the Sharks, Plumtree can look back on three trophies won. More importantly, though, he has laid deep foundations for the challenge of winning the major tournaments.