Plumtree: 'Sharks have few days to find spark, confidence'
REACTION: The frustration in Sharks coach John Plumtree’s voice was evident when he spoke about yet another loss on tour as the Sharks came unstuck against Ospreys on Friday evening.
It is clear the head coach of the Sharks is trying his best to pinpoint the problems they are experiencing on tour, but indicated that discipline was one of the major issues.
“So frustrating. We started really well, scored a good try. Our discipline wasn’t good enough and we had to defend for long periods in our own 22,” Plumtree said after the game.
“They came away with a try and then we get a line-break and then we made poor decisions that allowed them to get an intercept and score under the post.
“And then a soft try before half-time and straight away you are 5-19 down and chasing the game in the second half plus a yellow card.
“The fact that we weren’t good enough to build pressure and take our opportunities and also our discipline is a real worry.”
The head coach said it was important to take a long look at themselves and only one week to fix the problems.
“We have to really look at ourselves. As much as Ospreys deserved that win, I don’t think they were that much better than us.
We should be doing a lot better so we got a pretty tough week ahead of us. We have to find some belief and find some confidence, work on some of these things that are letting us down,” he observed.
He felt that the Sharks have been making the same mistakes since their first game on tour against Munster and that the same issues keep cropping up.
“It happened in Munster, some of it happened last week as well and it is still happening now. So we are a little bit slow to learn and we’ve got to find out how to get some confidence in our game.”
He didn’t want to use the excuse that some of his top charges were not available for the tour.
“Everyone’s got some of their players out, we’ve got a couple of injuries as well and it doesn’t help. I still believe that we’ve got a good enough squad to do better than what we are doing.
“I’ve called for some patience and it’s going to take time to build our game but some of the stuff that we can’t control is mainly around our discipline, decision making and us being able to take some opportunities that we create.
“We are just not good enough to be clinical enough to know those opportunities. This is a really important week for us. We’ve been on tour for three weeks and we haven’t had any success.
“So we just got to make sure we stick real tight as a group. We will make sure we prepare them well the best we can so we can get the best result in Italy.
“We’ve got to find that little bit of spark and confidence we need. So we’ve got to find that in the next five, six days.”
