Cockerill taps into Edinburgh history in bid to breathe new life into club
● Head coach intent on improvement ● Wary of ‘wounded animal’ Scarlets
months,” said the head coach yesterday.
“There’s a lot of history to this club we need to dig into and dig out. It’s got a lot of history of exceptionally good players who’ve played for Scotland and the Lions and we need to revisit that history. But we’ve got to keep working hard.”
Cockerill reacted to Friday’s defeat with, publicly at least, a fairly restrained fury and is taking a level-headed approach as Edinburgh face a testing trip to the champions Scarlets on Saturday before an away game against Leinster.
“We weren’t the best team in the competition when we beat Cardiff, and we’re not the worst team now we’ve lost to Treviso,” he said.
“We fell flat on our faces on Friday. I don’t want to blame the referee or anyone else, it’s purely our responsibility that it happened 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.”
Perversely, such a daunting
0 Head coach Richard Cockerill is taking a realistic view of Saturday’s testing clash with Scarlets. trip could be just the medicine needed to focus minds, though the coach laughed when asked if concerted effort and the avoidance of any complacency could at least be relied upon this weekend.
“I’m never expecting anything ever again,” he said. “We’ll train as well as we can this week, we’ll put a good side out 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.”
Scarlets will be a wounded animal after losing their first match in the competition for ten games at the weekend when they fell to Ulster and Cockerill accepts that a trip to Llanelli will be a much tougher examination than they faced in the Welsh capital on the opening night.
“Scarlets have a better team and better squad [to Cardiff ],” he said. “They are very strong across the board with internationals and British Lions. They play a very good brand of rugby that’s difficult to play against.
“You let them get on the front foot and play with ball in hand over the gain line then it’s very difficult. We have to defend better than we did on Friday, we’ve got to front up like we did against Cardiff and we’ve got to go another step. If we don’t it’ll be an uncomfortable afternoon.
“I’d have liked to have been three from three going to Scarlets and given it full noise and gone there with some confidence. But at the weekend we let ourselves down and we’ve got to go to two very difficult away games and we’ve got to have a reaction, front up and make sure we perform.
“There’s no magic recipe to making us good – it’s about training well every week, training well in the gym, looking after your lifestyle, getting out on the field and working hard together.”