Neil Powell was in no mood to make excuses after his side suffered a heavy defeat in the coastal derby, but is still confident the Sharks can qualify for the Vodacom United Rugby Championship playoffs.
Powell’s flying Sharks were brought back to earth by a rampaging Stormers side, who scored six tries to earn a bonus-point victory at Kings Park on Saturday.
The Sharks were coming off a morale-boosting victory in Edinburgh, but were completely dominated by the Stormers.
“We have to be better and learn from our mistakes,” said Powell after the match. “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.
“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 a coaching staff we will look at ourselves first and then ask questions of the team, 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.
“We will have a hard look at ourselves and make sure we don’t get into this situation again.”
When questioned about the Sharks’ consistency this season, Powell moved to defend his record since taking charge as head coach, saying the derby loss was the ‘exception’ rather than the standard.
“In our last few games, we have been really consistent. This was probably the first one where I felt we were really not up for it, even in the Harlequins game [in London] I felt we put in a good effort. This was the exception for me in terms of effort and what we wanted to do.
“That consistency is always tough, but there are no excuses. If we want to be a champion team, we have to get ourselves up for every game and make sure we are mentally prepared for whatever the opposition is doing.”
The result meant that the Sharks were unable to capitalise on one of their two games in hand and will remain in eighth place on the table, only two points ahead of ninth-placed Edinburgh.
While there is very little room for error, Powell was confident that there are still enough games for the Sharks to secure a playoff place.
“We’ve still got six or seven games left. We are only halfway through the season. There are still a lot of games to play. I do believe that we can still make the knockout stages.”
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