The Cell C Sharks went down 46-19 to the DHL Stormers in their round one Vodacom United Rugby Championship clash at Hollywoodbets Kings Park on Saturday afternoon.
Cell C Sharks Director of Rugby Neil Powell was in no mood to make excuses for his side's disappointing performance, however, he was confident that the Cell C Sharks can still qualify for the Vodacom United Rugby Championship playoffs.
“There are no excuses. We got to get better and we got to learn from our mistakes. It is just not good enough."
“We will have a hard look at ourselves and make sure that we don’t get ourselves in this position again.”
“We have to be better and learn from our mistakes, we knew the Stormers are the team that will punish you if you make mistakes and that’s exactly what they did. They just capitalised on our mistakes.
“From our mental approach, it’s a massive disappointment, but it is a good lesson for us and we take this on the chin.
“In terms of our mental prep coming into this game, I don’t know if we thought after the Edinburgh game that this would be easy, being at home. We are obviously disappointed. As coaching staff, we will look at ourselves first and then ask questions of the team, about what we could have done better to prepare for this game.
“It wasn’t good enough. We will take it on the chin. We have to learn from this. We cannot get in the situation again, where we played so well and showed so much character and fight and in the next game, there is none of that. It almost undoes all the good things we did in Edinburgh."
Cell C Sharks captain Phepsi Buthelezi admitted afterwards, “We were never really in it, we didn’t get the start we hoped to and made too many errors, team and individual errors and we unfortunately never got out of that slump.
“After last week’s win, we have to go back to the drawing board because inconsistency is something we’ve been speaking about all season."
“To all our fans and those who came to support us, I want to apologise for that performance, it’s not the standard we aspire to.”
