John Plumtree. Image © sharksrugby.co.za

05 March 2010 (08:00) - With the difficult run of results in the Vodacom Super 14, Sharks coach John Plumtree admitted that the mood in the camp obviously has to be strong or it could spiral into negativity and Saturday’s match against the Waratahs presents the perfect opportunity to turn their fortunes around.

“That’s all we’ve talked about given the situation we’re in,” he explained from The Sharks camp in Manly, Sydney. “We’re a very proud side, the team’s been used to winning and we’re not doing that at the moment, so mentally it’s very tough. But we’ve got to get over that, we’re just looking forward to this weekend and that’s all you can do in this competition, you can’t dwell too much on the past.”

He also admitted that a lot of hard work is involved to make matters right, that they won’t simply do that automatically. “It’s no use burying our heads in the sand and thinking it will just come right by itself, so we’ve worked really hard in training, the team’s pretty settled now, over jetlag and stuff like that and we just want to try and sort things out so we can get a good performance in this week.”

The Waratahs have played three away matches and two of them in South Africa, and despite their similarly-positioned log status, Plumtree expects a tough battle on Saturday.

“It was a pretty good effort from them against the Bulls in Pretoria on Saturday and to score 38 points against the Bulls, that’s impressive,” he said. “They were also leading for much of that game, so we know what a quality outfit they are. They also improved a lot since the game they played against the Stormers, so they’ll being taking a lot of positives out of the Bulls game and looking forward to playing us at home.”

The Waratahs are only three points ahead of The Sharks who are just a win away from moving into the top half of the log. Plumtree agreed that this is going to be a very close Super 14.

“The style of the competition means it is going to be pretty tight, but we’re obviously only worrying about ourselves, not everyone else. We just have to get ourselves going and if we can get good performance in this weekend, we’d like to be able to shift up the log a few positions, it’s not very nice down near the bottom. We’re not used it.”

Sometimes a team puts pressure on itself, perhaps trying too hard and not being patient but for The Sharks, it’s all about making sure that what they do, they do right.

“We have our strengths and weakness as a team and need to focus on improving, working really hard on our strengths,” added the coach. “We obviously have to change the way we’re playing because what we’re doing at the moment is not good enough, that’s what we’ve talked about and worked on in training.”

The team named yesterday showed some changes to last week’s team and Plumtree explained that, “With the selection changes, it will be up to the team that is picked to go out there and do the job.”