Sharks claim second Super Rugby win

The Sharks were made to work hard for victory as a spirited Jaguares side proved dangerous with ball in hand. The visitors scored two tries, while the Sharks only managed to cross the whitewash once. Marcell Coetzee did the damage, going over at the back of a driving maul in the first half.

The rest of the Sharks points were scored by flyhalf Joe Pietersen, who slotted a conversion and four penalties to snap up a narrow victory. 

Just like Sharks director of rugby Gary Gold had predicted, the Jaguares came out firing. They did well to match the Sharks in terms of physicality and topped that off with some dangerous attacking play - which led to both of their tries. 

Nevertheless the Sharks stood firm and managed to close out the match, a testament to the hard work Omar Mouneimne has put in on the defensive structures in Durban. Gold admitted that his side were still ironing out some rough edges, but he was pleased that they faced up to the Jaguars' onslaught to grind out a win.

"Nearly a dozen of these guys played in the Test match here against South Africa last year and were victorious. They're a good team, they asked a lot of questions with ball in hand. We needed to play in the right areas of the field and I think in the first half we did," Gold said after the match.

"We needed to be more ruthless with ball in hand and we didn't do that in the first half. There's certainly a lot of room to improve, but I'm really happy with the character we showed. I thought our defensive effort in the 70th minute when they were in our half was great, I thought that could have led to a disastrous finish. But the guys stuck in and we scrambled well."

In comparison to last year's Super Rugby campaign, the Sharks are off to a fantastic start. Last week's win over the Kings afforded an opportunity to attack more freely and that allowed the Sharks to run in six tries. In stark contrast, Saturday's win required a more patient and hardy performance, built on strong defence and smart tactical play.

The Sharks will certainly take solace in the fact that they can run in tries and also close out close matches.

"I could wallow in the things I thought we hadn't done well tonight or we could choose to celebrate the things that we have improved on. The answer probably lies in a humble balance.

"We want to create  enough pressure on teams that when we get the opportunity we can turn them into scores. We had ten entries into their 22 at half time and we hadn't converted nearly enough of those. We set a target of trying to convert 60 or 70 percent of those and we didn't convert nearly 30 percent of them - it's not good enough," Gold said.

"But from our point of view, it was a good test out there tonight. We've got Kiwi teams in our pool and tonight was a good exercise in how we will have to deal with the Kiwi teams, their offloading game and how hard we will have to work catching up on the inside as well as our work rate off the ball. As long as we are improving, I'm satisfied."

The Sharks now face two massive South African derbies away from home. First up is a trip to Cape Town to take on the Stormers next weekend. Then the Sharks go to Loftus Versfeld to meet the Bulls in two weeks time.

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