The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Edinburgh’ s Euro hopes suffer blow
Richard Cockerill admits the next two weeks will be crucial in deciding whether his Edinburgh side can salvage their European ambitions.
The Murrayfield boss was looking for a win over Munster on Saturday night to boost their hopes of clinching the third and final Heineken Champions Cup place on offer in the Guinness PRO14’S B conference.
But they slumped to a 22-10 defeat against the conference leaders and registered their seventh defeat of a miserable campaign.
Cockerill knows time is running out with just five games remaining and his team 11 points behind third-placed Scarlets, who have played two games more than Edinburgh.
And he admits their next two games, against the Welsh outfit and basement boys Benetton, will be pivotal.
He said: “We had an opportunity to take a point out of the game tonight and didn’t manage it. Anything out of the game tonight would have been good for us.
“We know we’ve got to beat the teams around us. The games against Scarlets and Benetton in the next two weeks are going to be very important games. Then Connacht, Cardiff and Dragons.
“This was a tough one to start with in that block. We did some very good things and on another day we would have got a bit more out of the game.
“But at key moments, we just weren’t good enough.”
Cockerill felt he could take some positives from the defeat.
He said: “There were some good parts and some bad parts. It was a tough, physical game. We knew it would come down to small margins and we made some errors.
“They looked good at
their set-piece, we struggled at scrum and lineout time on occasions and if you do that in this weather and you get marched up the field, it’s always going to be tough.
“I’m pleased with the players’ effort and attitude. We stayed in the game at 17-10 when they kicked the ball dead and we had a centre-field scrum, some of our game management
could have been better but we stayed in the fight.
“They’re a good team and we didn’t do parts of our game as well as we’d have liked to, but that was credit to them because they put us under pressure.
“We were camped on their line at 3-3 and we had some confusion about what we were doing and suddenly it’s a knock-on, from that scrum we get
penalised, then they march us up the field and score at the other end and the swing’s massive.
“Another set of scrums under the posts when it’s 17-10, there’s an opportunity there and we didn’t manage to take it.
“They’re a good team, they played well and they deserved to win.
“We just need to those tiny bits better.” get