Three of the Sharks’ wins to date have been against the bottom teams

A sceptic would point out that that three of the Sharks’ Super Rugby wins to date have been against the bottom teams – the Cheetahs, Force, and Rebels – the other win being an impressive one at home against the Blues, who are second in the New Zealand conference and fifth overall.

An optimist would highlight the fact that a bonus-point win over the Crusaders in London on Sunday would see the Sharks equal the Stormers’ 2008 South African record of 16 log points on tour (the Sharks currently have 11 points from their visits to Perth, Melbourne and Hamilton).

A realistic would say that none of this really matters at this early stage of a season which will see each teams play 16 matches before the play-offs.

After five rounds It is too soon to get a good idea of who the top half a dozen teams are going to be, apart from the Crusaders, who are currently inhabiting another planet.

A Sharks realist would further point out that the Sharks generally are a team that finish stronger than they start, although there have been exceptions where they led at the halfway mark and then fell apart.

I am convinced that the Sharks are going to explode in the second half of this year’s competition when they attain peak fitness and get back to the intensity of their Currie Cup campaign.

Compared to September and October last year, the Sharks are some way off that pace in March. This will have something to do with the higher standard of Super Rugby but a lot to do with match fitness, which obviously gets increasingly better as the year wears.

You get fitness and you get match fitness, with the former being simply about aerobic capability and the latter about the body growing accustomed to the specific physical requirements of full-contact rugby.

It is easy – although hardly enjoyable – to run your butt off in pre-season training but another thing to have it kicked about in the full-blooded war that is match situations.

The Sharks forwards, in particular, are about 20 percent off the intensity they showed in the Currie Cup.

You might correctly point out that match fitness will get better for all Super teams , but my point is that for the specific game that the Sharks are aspiring to play – the high-tempo, ball-in-hand approach that kicked serious butt in the Currie Cup (and which contrasts with the slower, territory game the Bulls play, for example) – they are going to lift their intensity with each outing until they get to that same level.

Conditions on the day will sometimes call for a different approach, such as the heavy rain in Hamilton last week, in which case the Sharks players need to likewise get better as the season wears on – their kicking game against the Chiefs was poorly implemented.

And there is no better time for the Sharks to accelerate their game than on Sunday, because if they are leaden-footed against the Crusaders, they will see their backsides.

The thing is, the Sharks in 2011 have had some really good passages of play, as well as periods of play, but they have not been for long enough.

This will hopefully change as that match fitness we spoke about kicks in.

by Mike Greenaway .www.iol.co.za