STADE Francais are seen as a Heineken Cup team so, hopefully, Thursday night’s Amlin Challenge Cup clash with them at Sixways will be a little taste of that competition before it properly comes to Worcester.

We will be using the guys who have played in France in the build-up to the game against Stade, but French clubs can be very similar to their international side in that you don’t know what team will turn up until 20 minutes into the game with them.

Stade will bring a side full of quality players, but if we can catch them cold early on, there is no reason why we can’t claim the win. Having such a famous club coming to Sixways is great for us as a club and it will be nice for the fans too.

Although we have got a break from Aviva Premiership action for two weeks now while we start our European campaign, we will continue to just play whichever game is in front of us.

It would have been nice to have had a few more league games so we could try and put more points on the board, but we have some exciting matches coming up — starting with Stade on Thursday.

We spent a lot of the game defending in the 16-16 draw at Newcastle which will ultimately take its toll and makes life difficult when your opponents are relatively fresh at the end of the game.

The number of tackles we had to make was hard, but the Falcons upped their game late in the match and we didn’t respond as quickly as we would have liked. It is not a massively difficult thing to change, but the coaches and senior players must come up with a strategy to change the mentality.

There is no set way to do that, it’s just an individual thing for everyone in the group and we must find it.

We are struggling to impose ourselves on teams in an attacking sense and it is definitely a step up to play in the Premiership compared to the Championship last season where we scored tries more freely.

Some of that is to do with confidence — had we secured a few bonus-point wins early on, that would have given us more confidence, but it takes a while for that to grow.

Against Newcastle, Dale Rasmussen had a strong game — Alex Grove and Dale in the centres were smashing people all night long, which was great.

I though Shaun Perry had one of his best games in a Worcester jersey and he controlled things really well, while Joe Carlisle had a good game too — his kicking from the floor was superb.

Meanwhile, Craig Gillies made his 250th appearance for the club at Kingston Park and that is an absolutely incredible achievement — I can’t see modern era players doing that with one club.

It is a credit to Craig as a player and as a professional and we have been very lucky to have had him at Warriors — he has been a great servant to the club.