Durban – The effective sacking of Sharks head coach John Plumtree by new franchise chief executive John Smit this week was welcomed by a leading rugby transformation and development campaigner.
Plumtree, who has coached the team for almost five years, and has come off a particularly poor Super Rugby showing, has been labelled as “complacent and comfortable”.
While the New Zealand-born coach has remained mum about his dismissal, he is understood to be engaging a legal team to challenge Smit’s decision not to renew his contract.
Amid scrutiny over the lack of locally born black players making the Sharks’ first team, Transformation Action Committee chairman Martin Wiseman said that Plumtree’s “time was up”.
“I think he is done simply based on performance. He had a team and a management team that he hand-picked, and collectively they let him down, so now he must answer for that – it is synonymous with the industry,” he said.
Wiseman, who has actively campaigned for the development of the sport in the province, said that Plumtree did not play an active enough role in growing rugby in KZN.
“It has been a shortfall of the Sharks, and Plumtree should have played a more active role. I hope the new coach, whoever he may be, will change tack. We need to grow our home players and nurture their talent. I am all for thorough participation and development,” he added.
“He (Plumtree) has been at the Sharks for a long time, and has become complacent and comfortable, so much so that the results have been disappointing, with a 10th-place finish in the Super 15 (sic) tournament. The Sharks should not be finishing in a bottom position, considering the strength of the franchise and the resources that go into supporting the team. It is unacceptable,” Wiseman said.
The rugby activist warned against the institution of a quota system, saying that this would be a move in the wrong direction.
“I am not a person for quotas, and I do not want to be one to sit and count people of colour on any field. But we need a coach and his staff whose performance parameters were benchmarked against what we want to achieve, and that is the development of young players.
“You as a coach need to have a hand in the development of young players, and it is not about colour. Filling the team with blacks who are not talented just because we are forced to would just make us go backward.
“We should be developing local talent and not having to buy players from other provinces and other countries. By that virtue, if all 23 players in the squad were white and all were from KZN, we would have achieved our goal,” he added.
He said that, because the KwaZulu-Natal Rugby Union, a body tasked with the development of local players, was funded almost entirely by the Sharks Franchise, empty stadium seats meant that the sport in the province was suffering.
”The Sharks have lost their shine, and it has been that way for a long time,” he said.
The stadium looks run down and the pitch has even lost is glimmer. The atmosphere of excitement has gone and we need to make a conscious effort to turn the Sharks franchise around. Our coach and his entire staff are crucial to the success of rugby on the whole. The guys that are there have been in their positions long enough and it is time for change,” he said.
He said that development among players was not the only area of concern, and added that talented black coaches should be guided and nurtured by the Sharks.
“I think there is space for a black coach. There is a lot of talent and experience out there, and I am not saying they should be made head coach immediately, but they can be groomed to climb the ladder in the support staff… There are black coaches with experience and skill,” he said.
Wiseman hailed Smit as a visionary who could turn the team around after much negative media attention. – Sunday Tribune