THE OPENING ITEM on the agenda is the fixture list, Andy Friend suggesting that two of Connacht’s final three games in this season’s Rainbow Cup will be against Treviso and Ospreys. After that, who knows?
“As far as I’m aware we are due to play Benetton (Treviso) and Ospreys,” said Friend.
Yet no matter who they face, the Connacht coach knows his team will have to play for 80 rather than 14 minutes. Saturday proved that, Connacht starting superbly well, working their way into a 16-0 lead before Leinster remembered why they are champions. They won 50-21.
“I am going to complement Leinster rather than hammer ourselves,” said Friend, “but an area we need to get better at if we want to compete against the likes of Leinster, Munster, Ulster – the top three teams in the competition – is to make it harder for teams to get across the whitewash. I will pay a compliment to Leinster; when they got into our redzone, they were really clinical.
“How do we fix that? Well, we are going to have to become more ruthless; to be more physical, more clinical and absolutely dogged that they are not going to get across that line. To me, on Saturday, it was a bit too easy for Leinster to get across the tape.
“At 16-0, I didn’t see it coming. After the third try in that eight-minute spell, I knew we were in trouble. We came in at half-time and the mood was good as there is confidence within our group. We knew we could fight back.
“And to be fair, we did mix well with them in the second half. The scoreline does not look good. We were touched up by 29 points. That is not good enough.”
Too much was below par, their maul defence, their concession of so many penalties, their concession of so many tries.
“The area that hurt us tonight was our attacking breakdown,” said Friend. “Far too many times on Saturday we brought the ball into contact and we either got turned over or else we gave away a penalty. The way we carried in the first 14 minutes was excellent; we had dominance at that period but we went away from that and that is where Munster are going to come at us. They’ll attack our breakdown.
“We started the way wanted to. We had them on the back foot. We wanted them to be under their own posts saying, ‘how the hell did that happen?’ Credit to Leinster, their own ability to get out of that hole they were in was incredible. Their self-belief is remarkable.”
