Plymouth Comment

Andre Bester

“We just lost our shape in the last fifteen minutes of the first half, it became too easy and that was our problem. We gave far too many penalties away, the referee didn’t have a clue what was going on in the scrum. They were pulling down the scrum; they were re-starting mauls left, right and centre.

At one stage Graham Dawe was stood with his back to his own men and he turned around 360 degrees and re-joined the maul with the ball at the back. I have never ever seen that before in my life on a rugby pitch! The referee was just 2 yards away and those types of mistakes are idiotic!

The referee was very inconsistent, he rightly penalised us for a restarted maul in the first half, but they were doing it all the time and he never did anything about it. The scrimmaging was a disaster, we had the upper hand in the scrum and he penalized us four times in the scrum.

Why would we try to obstruct the scrum when we were the stronger scrum opposing their ball, we wouldn’t – it’s just common sense.

But at the end of the day that’s the way they play the game, I would rather loose matches playing the way we do, than win matches playing the way they play.

I don’t think any player develops here; it’s a disaster zone for any player that comes and to be coached like that. I don’t think you can win this league and go to the Premiership playing that way.

And secondly they’ve got a good back line, an extremely good back line but they don’t use it. It’s a travesty of justice for those players.

We knew after last week it was going to be difficult coming down here, 90% of the squad have never seen this place, they have never experienced a trip down here. Now suddenly next year it’s something that you recognize and that’s what it’s all about.

In terms of the game itself, we just needed a little bit of mental maturity. In the second half we needed guys to go and close it out for us to win the game. And we should have won this game very easily, because at stages they weren’t even in the game.

With what we had, we should have won this match - there’s no doubt about that. We had the possession but we were kicking absolutely dreadfully again, put Andrew Mehrtens in this side and we will be promoted!

I think our passing backs have to take the lead in terms of the structure of the game; you can’t expect second rowers and back rowers to boss the game in those terms. I think it’s a lot to do with experience.

I don’t think anyone would have said at the start of the year, or even just three weeks back, we would come down here and loose by just one point and score two tries and should have won the game.

WP Strauss had a penalty that should have been Strettle’s; Mike Whitehead had an easy penalty that he missed. At the end of the day I’m sometimes unforgiving about certain things, you can make mistakes over and over but if you don’t learn from those mistakes and boss things, then it’s time to call it a day!

With the interception, David Strettle had the ball in his hands and he dropped it, that would have been seven points and game over.

I’ll tell you, twelve months from now it will be unforgivable to loose here! I won’t be forgiven, I won’t forgive myself and I won’t forgive any player.

Their first try should not have been a try because they restarted the maul on five or six occasions. The referee should have called it, but he didn’t.

I’ve said to the players that I’m very proud of them. After Plymouth scored that mauling try, they tried it again on four or five occasions and we just absolutely blew them away. We showed them that could not do that to us anymore.”

“It’s obviously a great disappointment to us as you can probably tell by the tone of my voice; we’re all quite upset in there because we should have won this game today.

It was our stupid mistakes, we weren’t as mentally prepared as we should have been for a game like this – it was a big game for the club. We started the game well; we were 14 points up before we even knew it.

But then we let them back into it, we gave stupid penalties away and the officials weren’t really helping us in the way they can. But that’s just excuses, on the day we just weren’t good enough.

When I say we weren’t mentally prepared, sometimes you can feel an edge in the changing room, last week I thought we were outstanding beforehand. You could tell that something was going to erupt, but it just wasn’t as high as last week.

We’ve set ourselves really high standards, if you’d gone back two months you might have said a one point loss down here is not a bad result. But we are moving forward and we wanted to do really well down here, it’s a major disappointment to us.

It’s going to take me a couple of days to get over this because I’m quite upset by the loss and I think we should have won. If we’d won this I think we would have been almost home and dry for fourth spot. We weren’t that far off but it means we really have to fight hard for our goal which is fourth place.

Dawe’s has got them mauling very well and it’s hard, but it’s defendable. At stages today we defended it really well and other times they did get away, but against a side like Plymouth the only way you’re ever going to loose is if you give penalties away and we gave far too many penalties away.

If you give a penalty away on halfway and they kick it ten metres from your line, they’re going to set up that maul which is their major asset. But they played well, we can’t take that away from them and we just weren’t on top of our game.

Still we only lost by a point, we got the bonus and they’ve only gone three points ahead. If we win our game in hand then we go above them again.

“We got so far in front at 14-0 after twenty minutes we thought maybe it was going to be easy. Mentally we were all right and we played some really good stuff and got some early tries but then we just switched off.

If you switch off once or twice in this league, you get killed. As soon as we give penalties away – we gave six penalties away in the first half – they capitalized with their driving mauls. It wouldn’t be great to play behind that every week, especially if you’re a back! But it’s effective, it’s beaten us today and we can’t really grumble.

Our pack has been our dominant force over the last few weeks whilst we’ve been playing well and today we were just a bit sloppy, making silly errors. The referee didn’t allow us to play our game and I thought he was a bit two-faced at times and that’s very disappointing really.

We always believed we could win and when Strett’s went for the interception, ninety nine times out of a hundred he snaffles them up and goes under the posts. Just little things didn’t go our way, we made good inroads into them and then we’d drop the ball in critical situations.

Also our kicking wasn’t at its best today and our line out started to dysfunction late on as we chased the game. We had two second half kicks at goal that were pretty much pop shots and if one of those goes over its happy days.

But we’ll re-group for next week and I have no doubt that we’ll win because the crowd is fantastic when we play at home.

Graham Dawe

“It was a very hard fought win today, there was a fair pace to the game and Rotherham showed how good a team they are and what good players they’ve got and they’re all very comfortable on the ball.

They showed a great deal of tenacity and they are growing as a team, they play very good rugby, very quick and they’ve got a lot of good ball carriers.

We were a bit shell-shocked in the first twenty minutes, Rotherham have been on fire recently and they just moved too quickly for us, we were not used to it and it took a little while to get to grips with it.

The last fifteen minutes of the first half we really stepped up to the plate and scored two tries, but the second half was a completely different game. There was virtually no try scoring opportunities and very few penalties in kicking distance. Obviously Rotherham had one but they messed that up!

A lot of rugby was played and it was an exiting game, but most of it happened in the middle fifty. Our line out went well; we secured most of ours and managed to put a bit of pressure on the Rotherham ball. Our scrum found it hard going today, we recognize that Rotherham have a very good scrum.

It does look as though it may be between Plymouth and Rotherham for the fourth spot, but there’s a long way to go and it will be interesting to see how Penzance and Bedford cope over the next couple of months. But certainly for Rotherham and Plymouth, we hope that we’ll be in the top five, we don’t want to drop any further.”

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