A visibly disappointed Sharks head coach, John Plumtree, had no answer for the result against Ulster, who outplayed them in all departments except for the scrum and driving mauls.
“If you look at all the Springboks coming back into the team, they were maybe a little bit rusty. We can go into the excuses, but we knew what we needed to do tonight, and that was to get five log points to get back into the competition.”
“We got one, so that wasn’t good enough. The boys are hurting in the change room, and they won’t want to go back into that space themselves; they know they’re better than that.”
“We don’t have any excuses. We knew it would be ugly.
“Last season, when we returned from our overseas tour to face Glasgow Warriors, we strung together a good performance.
“We can’t go into that space. We have to be hard on ourselves and look at the reasons why we lost and in which areas we can be better.
“That comes down to our preparation with the coaches and everyone involved.
“That’s a big loss for us out there tonight. Then you lose Ruan Dreyer with what looks to be a serious knee injury and it looks like he could be out for a while now, so this could get uglier for us,”
“It’s a real tough night for us.”