No excuses for poor showing
There were no excuses being offered up from the Taranaki rugby camp after a sub-standard opening 20 minutes contributed heavily to their 42-26 hiding by Wellington on Saturday.
An elbow infection to Marty McKenzie and a sore calf muscle to co-captain Leighton Price saw them late scratched from the Mitre 10 Cup crossover match with Charlie Ngatai moved to fullback and Brad Tucker drafted into the second row.
The late changes did not help Taranaki’s cause but they were no reason for the way they started the match when they allowed Wellington to rack up 24 points inside the opening quarter off the back of a lineout that continued to border on inept and a defensive effort that was simply not good enough to contain their opposition’s threats.
Too often Taranaki allowed Wellington to offload, were not anywhere near as dominant in the tackle as they needed to be while a number of players simply found themselves out of position far too easily as they looked too gassed to get where they needed to be.
If the defence was worrying, Taranaki’s attack struggled as they often looked like they were not on the same page as pass after pass was either poorly directed or executed while the option taking continued to be questionable for a second straight week.
Through all the negatives there was a sprinkling of positives. They did get themselves back into the game on several occasions but those bright spots were quickly darkened by the side switching off and allowing Wellington to reply on the scoreboard far too easily.
‘‘You can get a gauge on a performance when you walk back into a changing room and it was very stale and quiet in ours,’’ Taranaki assistant coach Willie Rickards Wellington 42 (Asafo Aumua 2, Ben Lam, Julian Savea, Regan Verney tries; Jackson Garden 3 con, 3 pen, Dan Kirkpatrick con) Taranaki 26 (Charlie Ngatai, Sean Wainui, Lachlan Boshier, Waisake Naholo tries; Stephen Perofeta 3 con). HT: 27-14.
said. ‘‘There was a lot of disappointment following that performance.’’
In hindsight Taranaki might have opted to keep Ngatai at second five-eighth and play someone like Declan O’Donnell at fullback and brought All Black Waisake Naholo onto the wing but Rickards said they wanted to try and minimise the disruption as much as
they could.
‘‘Losing those guys obviously didn’t help but we’re not making any excuses for anything,’’ Rickards added.
‘‘Our lineout was poor and they scored tries off two malfunctions and I thought our scrum was inconsistent. We had moments when we were really dominant but then Wellington dominated us.’’
Rickards thought they had to work on the structure of their overall defence.
‘‘We felt the effort was OK but we had guys who were simply going to the wrong places.
‘‘We are not hiding from anything but when you have 20 minutes gone and you’re 24 points down it puts your attack under pressure and the players think they have to play the ball a little bit more. We just didn’t build phases could we were chasing the game after our really, really poor start.’’
Taranaki now have a week to improve things before they host Counties Manukau on Saturday night.