The Sharks are sweating on an injury to replacement fly half Jacques-Louis Potgieter who has been sent for scan on his calf.

The potential injury will be a big blow for the Sharks as they have already lost Patrick Lambie for about three weeks to a finger injury.

Lambie is expected to return in two weeks time after he missed the Crusaders clash and was originally ruled out for three weeks.

While losing Potgieter would be a blow for the Sharks coach Plumtree got some good news from the medical team in that there were no other injury concerns after last week’s loss to the Crusaders.

“His is probably our worst injury, other than one or two knocks.” said Plumtree on the Sharks site.

“Jacques-Louis is having a scan and we’re hoping he has a better than average chance of making it this week.”

Reflecting on their match against the Crusaders, Plumtree paid tribute to a team representing the most successful franchise in the history of the tournament. “I think they’re setting the benchmark for all the teams in this competition,” he said.

“Guys like Dan Carter and Sonny Bill Williams outside of him are big running threats, they open space up and you can’t leave Sonny alone or you’ll be in trouble. ”

“This is a team dangerous from counter-attack and turnover and after making one or two errors defensively, bang, they’d scored 14 points against us.”

While the Crusaders had to make 200 tackles in the game, it was a comprehensive first half performance that laid the platform for their victory over the Sharks, a half Plumtree said in which The Sharks battled.

“Our restarts weren’t good enough in terms of scrums and kick-offs, we let them in too early. ”

“You can’t afford not to be clinical against the Crusaders and some of our basics weren’t good on the weekend. We let ourselves down and they capitalised on that.

“But I was really pleased with the way we played, they had to make 60-odd more tackles than us.”

“That was how we played last year where the tackle count of the opposition was higher than us all the time and that was good to see.

“So if we can get more clinical and play with that kind of intensity we can do all right.”

Plumtree was also forced to admit that the scrumming was well below the standard he expected.

“We didn’t scrum well as a unit, we knew what was coming, that they have one of best scrums in the competition, we had a plan to counteract it, but as a unit we scrummed poorly.

“It was one of our worst scrummaging performances in a long time. “