Durban - Sharks director Neil Powell would be unsure whether to laugh or cry after his team launched a heroic comeback to almost steal the spoils at the Cape Town Stadium but did not finish it off thanks to disastrous decision-making in the last minutes.
The Sharks showed tremendous character to fight back to 26-23 with ten minutes to go after having trailed 19-6 at halftime and having had their forwards outgunned from the start, but the reality is that with four rounds to go before the playoffs, the Durbaites are in a tenuous seventh position, just inside the top eight.
If they slip out of the top eight, they don’t make the quarter-finals and they don’t qualify for next season’s lucrative Heineken Cup. Unless of course, they win the current Heineken Cup — the winner is guaranteed a place.
As gutsy as the Sharks were, this game will also be remembered for the smorgasbord of golden opportunities the home team butchered, to the frustration of the 30 000 Capetonians watching with hands on their heads.
It was the criminal mistakes made by the Stormers' backs with the tryline beckoning that kept the Sharks in the game.
Another major problem with this game was the agony of watching set scrums repeatedly collapsing. When are the lawmakers going to understand that rugby fans have much better things to do with their Saturday afternoons than watch scrums collapse followed by the agony of watching 16 men wearily dragging themselves to their feet, only to collapse in a heap once more...
This is why rugby league fans can’t bear to watch rugby union.
Nevertheless, the game somehow staggered to an exciting conclusion. The Sharks may not have a backup tight five for their Springbok contingent but they do have dangerous backs and it was the wrecking ball posing as Rohan Janse van Rensburg that bulldozed them back into the game.
If Van Rensburg is the Sharks' broadsword, Grant Williams is their rapier.
Every game the Sharks play, Williams crafts a spectacular solo try out of nothing with his blistering pace. This time he spotted a tiny gap in a tangle of Stormers forwards and then sped through like a shot.
And as the Sharks clawed their way back on the scoreboard, so the Stormers’ discipline imploded and they would play the last ten minutes with Sazi Sansi and Seabelo Senatle in the sin bin.
All the momentum was with the Sharks only for them to play the dumbest ten minutes of rugby I can remember. They had a two-man advantage and yet went out of their way to not take advantage of it, and the Stormers gratefully hung on for the win.
Between Bosch and replacement scrumhalf Cameron Wright, the Sharks inexplicably played out the game in their own 22, and the last action was a Manie Libbok penalty for a 29-26 win.
IOL Sport