Sharks coach John Plumtree has made it public knowledge that he will select his captain for the season next week sometime, and this got me thinking as to who the candidates could be. My 2 minute self debate ended quite simply with another year under Keegan Daniel. But then I had a few beers with a good mate of mine, and this is what we decided would be best for the Black and White.

After taking into consideration what Morne said in a very detailed article last week sometime, we decided to ignore the premise of building the team around your captain, and simply selecting a player that, if fit, will automatically be in the starting line up. Now at the Sharks, there aren’t many of these hanging around.

Running through our squad list, we managed to find only five players that will always be penned into the starting line up, and this without much discussion or thinking twice about it. These are – our Springbok front rower Beast Mtawarira, Bismarck du Plessis and Jannie du Plessis, the magic man in the flyhalf jumper, Mr Pat Lambie, and the one and only slick running JP Pietersen out on the wing.

As you can imagine, this type of debate can only make a man thirsty, and after cracking open another cold one, we went about selecting our captain from these five canditates. It was easy to eliminate a few early on, as with JP Pietersen, being stuck on the wing is hardly a place for a captain to be. And we managed to agree that Pat Lambie was still a little wet behind the ears to take on this responsibility, allowing him to focus on handing off Schalk and scoring tries.

This leaves us with three big front rowers, all more than capable of striking fear into their opponents hearts, but only one who commands respect like no other, our big hooker, Bismarck du Plessis. This decision was not taken lightly, as the responsibility of being captain will not only push Bismarck to lead from the front, but will also force the man to tidy up his act in terms of discipline.

So there you have it Plum, if you are still undecided as to who your captain should be, you are more than welcome to join me and my mate for a few beers and we can discuss this at length, or until the beers run out.