New Sharks coach Kevin Putt has a huge task ahead of him.
When Kevin Putt agreed to return to Durban to coach the Sharks he probably wasn’t expecting to have to do a Lazarus job. He would have anticipated a solid mid-table position for last year’s Super 12 finalists, not stone last with one point from five games.
Putt, the former Sharks scrumhalf, has actually come back to his second home about three years early by his own estimate. When we met on the eve of his departure, three years ago, at his home in Richards Bay, he was candid about his reasons for leaving South Africa.
His young daughter needed medical attention that could only be found in Britain. His rugby career was of secondary importance, although earning pounds at London Irish wasn’t a bad way to continue it. But even then he had his mind set on coming back. ”Two more years playing,” he said, ”work my way up the coaching ladder and then come back and coach the Sharks in about 2005. If they’ll have me, of course.”
So here he is, three seasons ahead of schedule and with a lot of angry stakeholders to placate. There are those who will correctly suggest that at the age of 36 he has no place coaching a Super 12 side.
He is as underdone as Carel du Plessis was when he took on the Springbok coaching job in 1997. He is as likely to fail hugely as he is to succeed spectacularly. Only a kind of plodding mediocrity is completely out of the question.
So why is there a feeling of optimism at Putt’s appointment? Because, despite the fact that he played five games for the Springboks (none of them Tests) and despite the fact that he has a ready wit, Putt is at heart a hard-bitten Kiwi who brings the kind of informed outsider’s view that South African rugby is desperately in need of right now.
Putt is a Waikato native and the only man to have been selected for both the All Black and Springbok sevens teams. Even so, he came to Durban in 1990 not as a high-profile transfer, but as an enthusiastic club player looking to work his way up the ranks.
It took him three years to move ahead of Robert du Preez in Ian McIntosh’s first-choice team. Having got his chance, however, Putt never looked back and introduced a cerebral method at the base of the scrum that finally brought out the best in Henry Honiball, Dick Muir and Jeremy Thompson in midfield.
Putt’s greatest strength was his decision-making under pressure. Put simply he knew when to kick, when to pass, when to run and when to tell the referee what he should be looking for at the breakdown. It is a fact that no South African team has had a comparable hand on the rudder since Putt’s departure.
So the reason for optimism is based around the solid fundamentals that Putt brings to the job. He takes over a team that may have lost five games in a row, but retains the solid structures put in place by Rudolph Straeuli, the man who this week officially became the ninth Springbok coach since readmission.
The Sharks are a side that knows how to defend, but needs a few ideas in how to use the ball it wins. In other words, it needs a good scrumhalf, which is not to denigrate Craig Davidson, but merely to point out that the arrival of as fine a technician as Putt could be just the catalyst needed to take the youngster’s game to a new level.
Given all that has gone before this could qualify as the verbal equivalent of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, but the Sharks are by no means as bad as their results this year have suggested and against a team of poor travellers like the Blues they should be able to give their new coach a win this week.
After a month on the road, the Cats have similar chances when they take on the Chiefs in Bloemfontein. Coach Frans Ludeke has had a desperate run with injuries and is down to his fifth-choice centre pairing in Danie van Schalkwyk and Jorrie Muller. But there were signs in last week’s 30-21 defeat against the Hurricanes that things were finally coming right.
Not so in the Bulls camp. Coach Heyneke Meyer may be happy to be away from the media critics in South Africa, but he would surely rather be almost anywhere in his first tour game than up against the Crusaders in Christchurch.
The first South African victory on foreign soil this year will not come at Jade stadium, but the Stormers have half a chance against the under- performing Reds at Ballymore in Brisbane. Here’s hoping that the much-needed Easter break has restored a few batteries in our teams.