Post Plymouth Re-action

"In the context of all the injuries we have, some of the guys coming in have put their hand up and said, “Hey! I’m also around here – I’m going to be in contention.”

You know what, all those big guys with the big names on the bench today and all those injured – massive players – I look at them and I’m thinking they must be very worried. Look at how these smaller guys are doing, look at how much they’ve improved in one week!

Our 2^nd row improved immensely this week. Look at Gareth McComb, he’s not played at this level before and look at his performance today! Louis McGowan is getting better. Scott Donald was outstanding, Shrek was outstanding, Neil Cochrane was outstanding – everybody has worked very hard. Our line out was better this week, we’ve worked hard on that, but there’s always room for improvement.

We know giving penalties away against these guys is going to be a disaster zone and they scored three tries off that, but I take my hat off to our guys. Our biggest problem though is that we are not physically big currently, we are still in development phase with the squad of players. I’m not talking about the full squad; they have a great physical presence around them, the Holtby’s, Mitchell’s, Holtzhausen’s, Pienaar’s, Hala’Ufia’s, Strauss etc…"

Scott Donald

"We rested a little bit in the last twenty; we thought we’d done enough. It just shows in this league you can’t afford to do that. And really it came down to the crowd; they got us out of a really deep hole that we dug for ourselves.

For 60 minutes we looked brilliant, we played some great rugby and then for some reason we got 20 points ahead and stopped playing. We’ll work on that this week – it’s more mental than anything else.

It was a bit disparaging last week in Cornwall so it’s good to bounce back, especially here at home. We needed a good performance! After this performance hopefully we can get an even bigger crowd next week against Exeter and we can build on this and really show what we can do.

We’ve had a couple of hick-ups along the way, but you can expect that because we are such a new side. There are new guys out there and it’s going to take more than four or five games for us to really get to know each other. We’ve had some injury problems which has upset us a bit, but I think we now have the nucleus of a really good side and we’re just building on that every week.

Exeter next week will be very hard, but we’ll enjoy ourselves tonight and then work very hard from Monday next week."

Graham Dawe

"Rotherham were very open in midfield, they’ve got quality passing and good movement. They were very direct and very productive when they were in our 22.

We thought we could have nicked it at the end if we had been awarded a penalty try in the corner – I think we could have done it! With 25 minutes to go we were on a roll, but it’s surprising how quickly 25 minutes can go.

We didn’t field Rotherham’s kicks very well from their half. We didn’t return them well enough, we didn’t scrum well enough and we didn’t really drive well. We didn’t put them on the back foot, credit to Rotherham, but we were a little bit naive."