Neil Powell. (Photo by Darren Stewart/Gallo Images)
sharks rugby manager Neil Powell says they will look closely after a humiliating 46-19 home loss to the Stormers on Saturday.
After an impressive 22-19 away win over Edinburgh the week before, the Sharks were brought back down to earth thanks to the Stormers running in six tries to earn bonus points at Kings Park.
“We have to be better and learn from our mistakes,” Powell told reporters after the game. “We knew the Stormers are the team that will punish you if you make mistakes and that’s exactly what they did. They just capitalized on our mistakes.”
Powell admitted that his preparation could have been better.
“In terms of our mental preparation before this game, I don’t know if we thought after the Edinburgh game that it would be easy to be at home. We are obviously disappointed. As a coaching staff, we will look at ourselves first and then ask the team questions, what we could have done better to prepare for this game.
“It wasn’t good enough. We’ll take it on the chin. We have to learn from this. We can’t go back to the situation where we played so well and showed so much character and fight and the next game there isn’t any.” It almost undoes all the good things we did in Edinburgh.
“We will take a hard look at ourselves and make sure we are not in this situation again.”
CLOCK | 2 minutes in! Libbok assists Jantjies in the Stormers’ opening try
The defeat leaves the Sharks eighth in the URC table, with seven wins and five losses.
However, Powell feels they have been more consistent of late.
“Our last few games, we’ve been really consistent. This was probably the first one where I felt like we really weren’t ready for it, even in the Harlequins game.” [in London] I felt like we did a good effort. This was the exception for me in terms of effort and what we wanted to do.
“That consistency is always hard, but there are no excuses. If we want to be a champion team, we have to get up for every game and make sure we’re mentally prepared for whatever the opposition is doing.”
“We still have six or seven games left. We’re only halfway through the season. There are still a lot of games to play. I think we can still get to the knockout stages.”
