CONNACHT COACH ANDY Friend refused to associate himself with an outspoken attack on the standard of officiating in the Guinness Pro14 from Edinburgh head coach Richard Cockerill.
Connacht left Murrayfield with a losing bonus point as Edinburgh claimed their first win of the season, but Cockerill lambasted the officiating after a messy game saying: “If you are going to let teams cheat like that, then that is what you get. That is how it is.
“It threatens the credibility of the competition 100% percent. I am sending in reports every week back to Greg Garner, who is in charge of the refs, but things have to improve.”
“He’s entitled to that view,” was Friend’s only comment, the Connacht coach much more concerned about the performances from his players than that of the Welsh referee Ian Davies.
While he drew some comfort from the defence and the resilience they showed, he was more worried about their inability to hang onto the ball when they did win it.
“We want to be a team that expresses themselves, and we don’t want to take that out of the boys, but there is a balance to that. Last week we found it and in this game got it wrong,” Friend said.
“I thought the fight and the character of the boys to come back and get that bonus point was impressive. We did not want to be in that position – we put ourselves in that position – so to come away with a bonus point, given the first 40 minutes, was a fair result.
“The penalty count against us [in the first half] was something like 11 to one. I don’t know what the possession was but I would think something like 80% to Edinburgh. When we had the ball we did not execute the way we wanted, we did not look after the ball, so to be only 10-0 down at half time was pretty lucky.
“We got possession [in the final quarter] and managed to get some stability in the set piece. We managed to look after the ball a little better.”
The result was the only Connacht try of the game, claimed by Niyi Adeolokun, with Jack Carty kicking the conversion and a penalty to rescue the bonus point after Edinburgh claimed two tries, both converted, and a penalty.
“We knew they would some at us with a big, strong forward pack but if we could hold the ball and move them around we would nullify that a bit,” Friend added.
“We didn’t, we couldn’t hold the ball and we kept getting penalised. They kept marching up the field, going from scrum to maul to maul to another penalty. We played into their hands a bit. The last 20 minutes, we actually held onto the ball and moved them around a bit and that helped us.”
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