Edinburgh rugby
head coach RICHARD COCKERILL wants his side to bounce back from two away defeats and says the international pitch suits their game.
“Murrayfield is a great stadium we know it isn’t going to be full but we’re hoping for a big crowd”
0 Richard Cockerill believes Edinburgh are playing well and insists there is no panic despite away defeats against Ospreys and Ulster.
create more atmosphere. We all know that.”
Cockerill has made three changes to the starting lineup who started the agonising 30-29 loss at Ulster last week. Wing Duhan van der Merwe has recovered from the head knock he sustained on the opening weekend at Ospreys, openiside Hamish Watson returns to the back row after becoming a father last weekend and centre James Johnstone replaces the injured Mark Bennett.
Connacht bring back two Ireland internationals in scrum-half Kieran Marmion, who starts, and star centre Bundee Aki, who is on the bench, and Cockerill expects a tough test from a side who have pushed Glasgow close and thumped Zebre.
“I expect us to go and perform and win, as simple as
that,” said the coach. “Of course it’s an important game. If we play how we can play, we play as well as we can, we’ll get the right result. We need to start winning pretty soon don’t we and that needs to be tomorrow night.
“I know that there’s enough rugby in that Connacht team to cause teams problems. Obviously Glasgow have got a great start [in the first round of games in Galway] and controlled the game for large parts of it.
“Glasgow in the end got on top of them physically at times, but the Connacht team caused them all sorts of problems and were unlucky not to win the game in many ways.”
Cockerill feels that Edinburgh have been victims of bad luck themselves so far.
“We were a bit unfortunate that we got the wrong end of
the [Ulster] result – at a difficult place to go and play I thought we played very well,” he said.
“We’ve just got to replicate that again this week. Fort some bizarre reason in the Pro14 some teams have two home games and some have two away games at the start, so it was always a tough start.
“We need to perform well and we need to make sure we get the same performance as we got last week – if we do that I’m pretty sure that we’ll get the right result.”
Cockerill insisted that there was no panic and added: “We all have our responsibilities. We’redoingsomegoodthings. I know you guys [media] love to talk about the negatives, but there’s some real good things that we’re doing as well, and we need to make sure that we do that again on Friday.”