WINGER LUKE FITZGERALD has echoed the disappointment of head coach Matt O’Connor after two poor back-to-back performances from Leinster.
There was unhappiness with most aspects of their display in last week’s defeat to the Dragons, and despite picking up five points against Zebre last night, they failed to show the gulf which exists between the two teams.
With a trip to Wales to face the Ospreys up next for the reigning Guinness Pro12 Champions, improvement is a must.
“Boys were really disappointed with last week, with an awful lot of aspects,” said Fitzgerald. “I’d say nearly every aspect of the game, bar maybe lineout and scrum, which were actually pretty good weirdly enough.
“But this week I thought we were a little bit better. I thought we were a bit untidy first half, didn’t help ourselves. A lot of handling errors.
“I thought we were poor at the ruck and I thought once we tidied those things up we actually improved quite a bit. But obviously next week is a bit of a step up, or a huge step up, so we’re going to have to improve an awful lot again.”
The league’s bottom side carved Leinster open for a try and, but for being ravaged by injuries and international departures, Matt O’Connor’s could have been looking at back-to-back home defeats at the RDS.
While Leinster welcomed back a host of international stars, Zebre needed to draft in five players from the Italian league for the trip to Dublin.
Eight players weren’t available for selection for the visitors due to injury, while their entire front-five, as well as five backs, remained in Italian camp.
They needed to replace both out-halves within the first 35 minutes, with scrum-half Alberto Chillon playing the remainder at 10. Further injuries saw winger David Odiete replace lock Valerio Bernabò for the final 15 minutes.
In spite of these and a management rift, which saw head coach Andrea Cavinato and director Roberto Manghi resign today, Leinster were pushed hard by the Italians.
Fitzgerald said: “Something like that [the Zebre try] is a momentum changer. Things like that can affect you. It was really disappointing having had an awful lot of pressure and looking like we were getting a bit of momentum ourselves.
“Then, for it to swing like that off one poor kick-chase, it shows you, no matter who you are playing, you can’t ease off at any stage.
“We made a pretty poor system error there. Very disappointed with that.
“It was a soft enough try in the grand scheme of things, but I thought the recovery was very good and we focused on that at the end of the game.
“Matt was saying, let’s get that out of our system, great to get the five points in the end, great fight back but a huge amount to improve on.”