The Sharks are not excusing their loss to the Chiefs in New Zealand but were they fatigued from different time zones?
|||The Sharks may not make excuses for Saturday’s loss to the Chiefs in New Zealand but anyone who has travelled overseas can tell you about the fatigue that comes with adapting to different time zones.
Take that fatigue and multiply it by three and you get a sense of what the Sharks players feel like today.
Since the Sharks beat the Cheetahs 34-15 on July 14 in Durban, they have travelled a rough total of 52 353km in 70 hours – almost three days.
And that doesn’t include the flight delays and stopovers.
The weary Super 15 finalists arrived in Durban yesterday – two hours later than scheduled after King Shaka Airport was closed as a result of a 1Time flight making an emergency landing.
John Allen, CEO of the SA Rugby Legends Association, yesterday said the Sharks had been travelling so much in the past month of the rugby Super 15 tournament they may have lost track as to which stadium they were playing in.
He said it would have been near impossible for them to win the final game against the Chiefs on Saturday.
From Durban they travelled via Johannesburg and Sydney to Brisbane for their game against the Reds where they won by 13 points.
From there it was back via Sydney and Johannesburg to Cape Town where they beat the Stormers 26-19. And the last stretch was from Cape Town, via Johannesburg, Sydney, and Auckland, to the final game in Hamilton, New Zealand, where they lost to the Chiefs by 31 points. All-in-all the team endured 11 flights in just 20 days.
Allen said this amount of travelling was “most unusual”.
“The organisers do try to make the travelling as fair as possible, and travelling is part of the job, but it still takes it out of you physically and mentally.” He said it was very unusual for a single team to travel that much, let alone to travel that much and then win.
George Laas of the Durban Sharks Supporters Club said if the Sharks had played the Chiefs in Durban, it would have been totally different.
“But travelling is part of the game and the Sharks need to adapt to it,” he said. - Daily News