Some reflections on Sale 23 Exeter 30

By Whaley Shark
November 26 2011

Well, they do many things differently in the West Country, but I never realised that they had Christmas a month earlier than the rest of us. Our players clearly knew all about this odd habit, or just fell for a tall tale from the far West, and sent Exeter home with a gift-wrapped four points.

I suppose one way of looking at it is that, at 23-all with a couple of minutes to go, there were only two league points at stake, and the worst that could happen was to lose by seven, which would preserve one of them. So that interception actually cost us one point, and if we’d sneaked a win, we’d have got two. Gambling one point in the hope of winning two doesn’t, on reflection, seem like too bad a punt.

The far more disturbing question is ‘How on Earth did we find ourselves at 23-all?’ (impressionable youngsters read my gibbering, so this question is not the one I originally wrote down).  Ball in hand, playing heads-up rugby, we clearly have firepower, and in that first quarter we were matching Exeter in the scrum as well.  What we don’t have is an effective Plan B. We do have a fair number of young players and I think we are prone to panic, so whether there is a Plan B, but we lose our heads and don’t implement it, or there just isn’t one, I’m not certain. I’d like to think it’s the former.

How do we get over this tendency to panic? Sadly, only through experience, I suspect. Exeter’s suffocating pressure was less clinically applied than Leicester’s, but comparably effective. We need to learn to do all those gnarly professional things- up the jumper, deep touchfinders into their half, slow the game down. I am sure that, if we’d had a pointless second half and won 23-7, we’d have all been going on about ‘Why didn’t we go for the try bonus?’, but the reality would be that we had four points and they had none.

So how do we steady the ship when it starts to rock violently, and we need to, because every DoR will have realised that we are vulnerable? Well, the 10 has to play a crucial role. Personally, I like Nick Macleod, who never seems to shirk responsibility. He’s no dancer on the gain line as Charlie was, but he does have strengths and maybe we need to play better to them. Also, emerging from Charlie’s shadow, perhaps he needs some time to develop into a Premiership 10? Or maybe if this as good as he can do, then his doubters are right- me, I’d give him more time. And as for the newly arrived Tasesa Lavea, who had the home debut from Hell, well, wasn’t he just the fall guy, who did no more than crystallise a loss that was coming for pretty much all of the second half? We shouldn’t judge him on a few minutes at the end of a game which was running away from us.

The other thing you need is to have some confidence that you can retain the ball. We are clearly competitive at the ruck, but the scrum is a festering weakness and I guess Dimes’s judgement is that our front row gain us more in loose play than they cost us in the tight. But to exploit that advantage, you need a loose style of play, which militates against the up-your-jumper rugby which you’d need to close a game down. A couple of seasoned campaigners on the bench, to give you that solidity, would be an asset though, sadly, Sherri and Joe Ward, who I think would do that job, are both injured at the moment. I think Vadim Cobilas has it in him to play that game, but probably doesn’t have the experience yet to do so.

I’m sure there will be a lot of soul-searching this week, and maybe Tuesday night will be more challenging for Dimes than a comfortable win would have made it, but I’m sure he’ll front up. I still see promise in the side and maybe last night has reminded us that there are no truly poor Premiership sides. It’s an unforgiving game of fine margins, and succeeding in it is tough.