IMAGINE IF YOU had an emoji that could convey Graham Rowntree’s expression when he is disappointed?
After going an hour without scoring against Ulster and letting all momentum and authority from their performance slip, he couldn’t help conveying the dark mood of the dressing room he had just left.
“We were inaccurate. Sloppy. Ill-disciplined,” he rattled out.
“Our ruck wasn’t fast enough and that is the heartbeat of the game for us. Really disappointed.”
He continued the list. “Our setpiece malfunctioned. Yeah, we were chasing the game at the end there, which I expect from us. We are never going to give up but we have to be better than that. We’re not pointing the finger at anyone else. We will have a good look at ourselves this week. That’s not good enough.”
That’s not to say that he was in the mindset of thinking there was only one team on the park.
“They (Ulster) were positively putting pressure on us. We were piggy-backing penalties and getting put onto our own goal line, losing lineouts, we got run off our scrum and couldn’t consistently string any phases together in the middle of the field.
“Hugely, hugely disappointed dressing-room down there. That just was not us. I said that to them. It’s just not us. We will own up, we will go away and we will get better for that.”
At that point, he turns to the future. At the mention of Stormers in Thomond Park on Saturday, he does the Rowntree half-smile and says, “Our old mates…”
He then gets on track, “We are on a run now until the end of January. We have big games every week. “We have a long week now to wallow in that performance. We will come in on Monday and review it, get selection right and then we will move forward. That just wasn’t us.”
Asked if the players were feeling that in the dressing room, he said, “Yeah. They certainly felt that from me. There’s an honest group there. Nah, that wasn’t good enough and that is the headline from me as the head coach and from the players; not good enough.”
Thrown the bone of the three Ireland Internationals – Tadgh Beirne, Peter O’Mahoney and Conor Murray – that were kept in the deep freeze, he took whatever blame might have been going.
“I didn’t consider this weekend. Those guys have played a lot of gametime in that World Cup and they were coming back into a short week.
“I stand by that. I stand by our selection this week. And we have those guys potentially coming back in next week. We will deal with that on Monday.”
