NO HIDING PLACE

Cockerill takes flak for Benetton disaster and seeks Scarlets reaction

IT was the night when Edinburgh’s old failings resurfaced and provided a new experience for Richard Cockerill as he tasted defeat for the first time since taking the reins.

However, there was to be no hiding place for the head coach after Friday’s shock 20-17 defeat to Benetton at Myreside.

Indeed, rather than leave one of his assistant coaches — which had been the plan — to face the media yesterday, he made it clear the buck stopped with him.

‘When the team don’t play well, that’s my responsibility,’ said Cockerill when asked why he had unexpectedly decided to front up the press conference.

The Englishman was in bullish mood, too. He was clear: he wanted to make sweeping changes for Edinburgh’s match against champions Scarlets in Wales on Saturday. Instead, he has been left frustrated at the lack of strength in depth which has stopped him wielding the axe as much as he wanted to in the wake of Friday’s abject display.

‘I’d have liked to have been three from three going to Scarlets at the weekend and giving it full noise and gone there with some confidence,’ said Cockerill. ‘But at Myreside, we let ourselves down and we’ve got to have a reaction, front up and make sure we perform in our next game.

‘We had two good performances in pre-season, one against Cardiff when we were on it in our first league game, a so-so performance against Newport when we got ourselves out of it, and we got royally bitten on the backside at home at the weekend.

‘The performance against Benetton isn’t acceptable. And if guys want to play like that then they won’t, they can’t, stay in the team. Unfortunately, I don’t have a complete set of players to change everybody, so some guys will get another opportunity against Scarlets.’

Cockerill revealed he had a ‘robust’ debrief with his players, insisting they had switched off far too easily against a team who hadn’t won outside of Italy in four-and-a-half years.

And although he did not single out any individuals, he didn’t miss the target in his criticism.

‘We had a robust meeting on what I expect and where we need to be, and how I expect them to prepare and behave around performance,’ said Cockerill.

‘Consistency of performance has got to be our key, and effort, training, preparation on match day. It’s easy to do it once or twice, but can you do it 25 times a year as a player? That’s the sweet spot that we’ve got to meet. Now some guys can do that already. Some guys clearly can’t.

‘I have learned some valuable lessons on how to deal with this group of players. At the moment, they need to be driven hard every day because if they’re not they switch off and that’s just the nature of the beast. So we’ll just keep working hard and working away and it’ll be a slow process.

‘Not everybody switches off and not everybody’s sloppy, but we’ve got to make sure the weakerminded of the group play and work as hard as the others and we’ll keep chipping away at that. It doesn’t happen overnight and we were making positive signs, but they weren’t as positive as we would have liked them to be.

‘We can’t play as individuals. We have to play as a team. We work as a team and we have to deliver what we practise because that is why everybody works so hard.’

Cockerill has only been at the club for four months and it is clearly too early to judge him, but he admits the loss to Benetton, one of the worst sides in the league this or any other season, was hard for him to comprehend.

‘I’m never expecting anything ever again!’ said the former Toulon and Leicester Tigers head coach. ‘We’ll train as well as we can this week, we’ll put a good side out against the Scarlets and I expect us to stay in the battle and try and win.

‘How realistic that is we’ll see. This team has a reputation of really poor performances and then beating the good sides, so I hope that continues.

‘We’re working hard on creating an environment, but it’s going to take longer than three or four months. We weren’t the best team in the competition when we beat Cardiff in our opening match, and we’re not the worst team now we’ve lost to Benetton.

‘We fell flat on our faces on Friday. It’s our responsibility and we have to be better than that. If we’re realistic and honest with each other, then that’s the starting point of improvement.’