WE are absolutely made up with the win over London Irish at Sixways.
We’ve been working so hard — I think we’re probably one of the hardest-working teams in the Aviva Premiership — and it paid off on Friday night.
Nothing’s changed really, every week we see an inprovement and we’ve got a structure in place that we are sticking to. We are a new team with a new management, so you have to remember things don’t happen overnight.
We just played well — we did the basics well, the line-out and scrum functioned and the pack gave us a bit or go-forward for the backs to play off.
It was big credit to the lads, but it’s just back to training today, getting our heads down and we’ll go again at Wasps on Sunday.
We lost four line-outs at Northampton in the first-half, so when we went in at the break we knew what we needed to do to correct it and we won every one in the second-half.
All that was needed was a little tweak, but we spotted that, had a chat with the lads and rectified it.
The line-out functioned pretty well against Irish and we were happy with it, but there is still loads to work on.
I don’t want to give too much away, but basically we just needed to get our line-out operating a bit smoother than it had been.
We were more worried about oppositions’ defence, rather than our attack, but we are a very tall set of forwards with five guys who are around 6ft 4 or 6ft 5, so with a good lift, jump and a decent throw, there’s no-one who can touch us. We’re massively upbeat after the win over Irish and that’s eight tries in two games now, so we’re moving in the right direction.
We’ve now got Wasps and we will be full of confidence going into that game. Then we play Sale at Sixways and we just need to start building momentum.
We’ve killed ourselves in the last few weeks in the changing rooms and on the training pitch, so hopefully we can take something out of that.
John Andress has been under quite a bit of scrutiny, but I thought he was outstanding on Friday. Matt Mullan is solid at loosehead, but it is always tough on that tighthead side, and John did really well.
We’ve had a rough ride in recent weeks against Gloucester, who have a big, experienced pack, and Northampton, who are renowned for winning penalties in their scrum, but we felt we could attack the Irish scrum and it looked pretty good.
We turned that game around at Northampton and we have a squad now where we can bring people onto the pitch who will be the same quality as the starting players and everyone brings something different — that is massively important for us throughout the season.
At the end of the day, the supporters want to see tries and it is good we’ve produced recently, but we won’t get carried away.
We have a good bunch of grafters here and, with Hilly’s mentality as well, we’ll just keep getting better and better.
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