MTC8: Pirates & Performances

By Prof
August 2 2006

The 8th report from the Quinssa Meet The Coaches Evening on 17th November 2005 when John Kingston and Andy Friend answered questions about the forthcoming Cornish Pirates game and on the best performance up until then.

Q: What problems do you think the Cornish Pirates will give us on Sunday (at home)?

Andy Friend (AF): We know their forwards are very strong and their back row is very good at contesting the ball at the breakdown. To be honest I think the biggest challenge is within us, if we can do the things we want to do and we do it with the passion and aggression that we do it with I know we can control the game, if we go into the game and we don’t play the percentages and we don’t play field position and we try to be cute with things we could get ourselves into trouble. One thing we know about the Cornish Pirates is that they have enormous self belief – they think they can win the game and they have a lot to prove coming up here. We can dampen that if we play our game and play it well, like we did against Exeter, but if we don’t we can get ourselves in trouble. The refereeing of the tackle contest is an area we have to look at, against Nottingham we were stung with 18 penalties for not rolling away fast enough – we were averaging about 9 a game before that. He was pretty hot on the whistle, so if we don’t look after the tackle area and do what the referee wants us to do we could get ourselves in trouble there too. 

John Kingston (JK): I can understand from your point of view why this game has been built up so much. In my mind it’s been built up for Sunday because it’s the next game. Every side we have played against this year has offered a challenge in different ways. The one thing I would say about Sunday is that we want to win the division and we are keen to get ourselves ahead of the rest of the opposition as far as possible as quick as possible. The one thing we’ve not been able to do all season is control the gap between ourselves and the other sides that are doing well and, at the moment, you can see that Bedford and Cornish Pirates are the sides that are doing next best. There is a double opportunity this weekend and the game after where we can control our own performance and we can knock them back. We’ve watched Cornish Pirates and we will present the information on the players tomorrow but I concur with Andy – at the end of the day 90% of it is about the way we go about playing ourselves, we’ve looked at it and we respect absolutely certain aspects of their game, but then you have to shut the book and have to go out and impose on them what we want to do and that’s what we’ve been focusing on this week.

  

Q: Which game do you see as being the best team performance and why?

JK: Coventry away because it was a shitfight (excuse my French) and the forwards had to roll their sleeves up and get stuck in, there had been various barbed comments about whether we could hack it because we wore multi-coloured shirts, which drives me mad, and we ripped them apart up front with very basic rugby. For that reason I would say that game. Especially when you hear things coming through from their second row, Ben Gulliver, when he said he’d never been hit as hard as that whenever he went into rucks, tackles or whatever. They’d had enough long before the final whistle because they’d been battered to bits. Maybe It wasn’t pretty, there were dreadful conditions, but we rolled our sleeves up and got stuck in. This perception of Harlequins not getting stuck in that’s been there since time immemorial is not right, we do not have the biggest pack in the world but I can sit here at the moment and tell you that we’ve won 92% of our lineout ball this year, the opposition have won 58% of their ball so you do the numbers. I don’t recall Harlequins’ scrum being pushed around this year despite people saying that that is where the problem was going to be. So in my opinion let it rain and if the forwards are getting stuck in and driving hard there is satisfaction for me there – I expect Andy wants to talk about backs dancing around… [laughs]

AF: How did you know?! [laughs] The Coventry (a) game was certainly a good game for us, the Exeter (h) was obviously a game where we threw the ball around a bit, the boys came off the field with smiles on their faces which, from the start of the year, was one of the things we wanted to see – we wanted to see the players enjoying their rugby and think ‘wow, that was fantastic!’ So that was one game that will stand out. A significant game was Otley (a) in that we didn’t play pretty football but we stuck at it and we won with the last play of the game. It’s significant for a couple of reasons: 1. It gave us a wake up call to say we can’t take any team lightly – not that we went in taking them lightly but there was an underlying current saying that we could just turn up and take them; and 2. for any team to be successful you have to grind wins out and we did that and the reserves came on and Mel Dean scored that try and, to be honest,  we snuck away with the win. It certainly gave us a wake up call, it certainly gave us, from the coaching side of things, the knowledge that the boys are prepared to stick at it.

JK: Andy, just on that note, I turn my mind back six or seven years ago when I was coaching Richmond and I was in Division 2 and we had a lot of good players to attack that division that season and we ended up winning the championship and going up with Newcastle. The preparations weren’t quite right, there was a lot of  ‘prima donna’ing’ going on and the first game we had was Coventry away and I shall never forget, someone who is close to you guys and ladies, Brian Moore, two days before we played Coventry I turned to Brian and said ‘something’s not right here, we’re in trouble on Saturday, this lot are better than we realise’ and he turned round and said ‘I know’ and I said ‘what can we do about it’ and you have to respect a man like that, he just turned around and said ‘there’s nothing you can do, it happens, what will be will be and we’ll just have to bloody well take it and accept what happens’. We went there and we drew and he turned round and said ‘ well, it happened and we got away with it’ and I guess there’s a bit of that in regard to Otley because no matter what you say to players or how you prepare they will never know what the flip side is before they go there. For us to get away with it that afternoon, which is what we did, was a massive positive, it was a massive game for us to come away with.