I AM sure I’m not alone in feeling somewhat relieved after Sunday afternoon’s match against Cornish Pirates. What a tense game.

That is one of the many reasons sport is so popular. For me, Sunday afternoon in Cornwall was a little too stressful.

I, like many others, watched the game from the comfort of my living room and was very pleased with how well we started the game.

We set out to starve them of possession and territory and that’s exactly what we did. The one thing missing was our ability to convert chances.

After 15 minutes, we began to make mistakes and slowly the Pirates got their tails up. As soon as teams sense an opportunity against us, they raise their game tenfold — a common trend in the Championship.

Our issue this time was that Pirates have the best attack we have faced this season. We needed our most astute defensive performance to date and that unfortunately didn’t unfold.

We will be looking closely at exactly where we conceded line-breaks and why the Cornishmen were allowed to break us three times from first phase.

These kind of statistics will be unacceptable in the play-offs and, looking ahead, in the Premiership.

We must solve our issues now as I am sure we will be meeting the Pirates again soon.

There has been much talk of the half-time talk that inspired us to come out and snatch victory. I have been told it very much resembled a Barack Obama-style ‘yes we can’ speech.

Thankfully, we can look back at it now with some humour. We went out and did exactly what we needed to do to win — a trait we have to learn this season and it seems we are getting there.

I was hugely impressed with our forwards’ efforts. For me, Greg Rawlinson epitomised our physicality and really enforced his presence on the opposition.

We may not be able to rely so heavily on such tactics in the play-offs or even in the Premiership.

We have achieved phase one of our task and we can now focus on the fine-tuning needed to secure promotion.

It is important to maintain our momentum and win the remainder of our games in the regular season, but the pressure is somewhat off slightly at this stage.

The rest of the squad are working hard as we enter the second week of our mini pre-season. Having less numbers to work with allows much greater detail in what we are doing.

I know the guys are now really looking forward to getting stuck into some rugby with the Currie game fast approaching.

One name we will hopefully see making the trip is Matt Mullan. After his stint on the touchlines, the shoulders are strong and he is raring to go.

Matt is looking in extremely good shape and I am sure he will be pushing to get involved as much as possible before the play-offs.

We find ourselves appearing on TV for the second time in two weeks when we meet Nottingham at Meadow Lane on Sunday. Let’s hope things go a little more straight forward for us this time and we make amends for allowing them to score so freely the last time we met.