With the Vodacom United Rugby Championship kicking off in a little over a month, the Hollywoodbets Sharks are juggling the requirements of their Carling Currie Cup campaign with their Springboks out of town for their Castle Lager Rugby Championship commitments and a small group of players currently involved in the pre-season block of training.
For Hollywoodbets Sharks head coach John Plumtree, this poses something of a test as he plans the next five weeks before his team heads north to take on Glasgow Warriors in their campaign opener on Friday, 26 September.
Following their first-round match against the 2023/24 champions, they head south to Wales to take on the Dragons, before closing out their three-week tour with a tough clash against the current title-holders, Ireland’s Leinster.
“The VURC preseason is going ok,” Plumtree explains.
“We have small numbers while the Carling Currie Cup is on, obviously, and also while the Boks are away.
“But we’ve been working on parts of our game, which is pretty difficult because we only have 10 or 12 players at training.”
With the tournament fast approaching and not a great amount of time available to prepare the team, the training group will be expanded.
The Carling Currie Cup and VURC players will be combined over the next two weeks. “So we’ll integrate the two groups now and then finish the Carling Currie Cup together.
The plan is to then use the final few games in the domestic tournament as pre-season games for the extended VURC squad to ready them for the competition.
“We also have a preseason game scheduled against the DHL Stormers the week before we head off to the UK for our three-week tour.”
There is no doubt that this is a challenge the team faces.
But as in every season and with every competition, there are hurdles and obstacles to a seamless transition from one tournament to the next.
The Springboks away on national duty, both during the Castle Lager Rugby Championship and then the autumn internationals in November when they take on France, Italy, Ireland and Wales, underlines the need for developing squad depth.
This is where this season’s Carling Currie Cup campaign has been so important to this end, as the team negotiate their way to and through the upcoming Vodacom United Rugby Championship campaign.
