WE lost our first home Aviva Premiership game of the season after conceding a late penalty to London Irish and they are always the worst defeats to take when you have played reasonably well, created lots of chances, but not taken them.
It is almost easier to lose soundly to a better team, but when you are in control of a game but don’t take advantage it’s very frustrating.
We were 10-3 up and could have gone well clear of Irish and then we had plenty of chances in the second-half, but we just killed ourselves.
Discipline is an issue for us and we are not hiding away from that — I felt there were some tough calls against us from the referee, but we won’t use that as an excuse.
For large parts of the match our phase play and attacking game was pretty good. We went through the phases well and with players like Chris Pennell, David Lemi and Josh Matavesi in the back-line, we looked sharp.
The positives for us were the number of chances we created and the two good tries we scored.
Dean Ryan spoke well after the game to put things in perspective — we are so close to getting it right, but we are not quite converting the good things we do on the training ground into the match-day scenario. We are still a young group in terms of how long we have been together.
The story of our second-half was that we created plenty of chances in the opposition’s red zone, but didn’t convert them.
Then, all of a sudden, the pressure was on us and we conceded penalties that gave Irish the field position to kick the winning goal, so we need to sort our discipline out and that is the major thing we are working on.
We have to remember we are only two games into the season and I can remember one year at Ospreys when we lost our first four games, but went on to win the league. Now, I’m, not saying we will win the league, but from the outside people are already thinking ‘nothing’s changed at Worcester’ but there needs to be an element of perspective.
It is not a crisis or anything like a relegation battle from game two of a long season, we just need to back ourselves a bit more and have the confidence to turn things around.
That starts with the visit of Harlequins to Sixways on Friday night and we’re looking forward to having a good home atmosphere and the crowd behind us again to get our season back on track.
It doesn’t matter if we are playing Quins or Toulouse, we just need to concentrate on getting our own house in order.
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