Cooper’s angst turns to relief
Colin Cooper eventually had reason to smile last night.
But for a large part of the 80 minutes before the post-match press conference, the Chiefs coach was an uncharacteristically frustrated man, forced to watch on nervously as his side looked like slipping to defeat to the lowly Blues in their Super Rugby clash in Hamilton.
In the end it was a penalty try awarded by referee Paul Williams with seven minutes to play which got the Chiefs a 21-19 victory at FMG Stadium Waikato – their fifth win on the trot, the Blues’ fifth loss from six games, and which stretched to 14 the already competition-record undefeated run the Chiefs have against their local rivals.
It made for a huge sigh of relief in the home team’s coaches box, with Cooper – already spooked by a scoreboard malfunction which had the clock at 79 minutes when there was more like 10 to play – feeling the automatic seven-pointer was just reward, after the Blues had had lock Josh Goodhue sin binned and were then pinged several times at the resulting scrums.
"I’m usually trying to tell everyone else to stay above the line and not get frustrated,’’ Cooper said. ‘‘But when you get penalty after penalty after penalty, and when it takes that long to get a penalty try, from scrums that we dominated most of the game, that was my frustration.
‘‘But we got there, and with a lot of patience and a lot of control we got what we deserved.’’
Cooper lauded the efforts of his team’s leaders to see the match home, acknowledging their experience and calmness that they displayed in what was a dominant second half, if not for the points put on the board, after the Blues had taken a 19-14 lead to halftime.
Captain Sam Cane said he was also feeling the pinch on the field, as the hosts looked to bank a game that everyone expected them to. ‘‘From experience, you can’t allow frustration to start creeping into your brain, otherwise it just dominates and affects the way you play the rest of the game,’’ he said.
‘‘We were creating opportunities and not finishing them off, and it felt like sometimes we weren’t getting the calls that we really wanted, and the combination of those two things ... a couple of times we just brought the key decision makers in and said ‘lads let’s not get frustrated’, we’ll get our crack and we’ll make the most of it when we do.’’
And they did, which left Blues coach Tana Umaga with a familiar post-game story, only this time, with some more positives, particularly with that leaky defence sewn up. ‘‘It was a better effort around that area, I think our attitude was just improved,’’ he said, noting it was just disappointing they couldn’t get out of their own half in the second spell.
‘‘We got stuck in the middle of the field a lot. Again it’s around that decision making – what kind of kick, are we enabling a good platform to kick, have we got a chase line rather than just kick. I think we were a lot better at it this week than we have been before.
‘‘We’re a resilient group. We have to be, with the way our results are going. We don’t believe it’s too far away, there’s little things that we can improve on every week.’’
The Blues, who face the Sunwolves in Tokyo next weekend, had yet more injury concerns out of the game, in Jerome Kaino (hamstring) and more seriously George Moala.
The Chiefs have an injury worry of their own as they eye up a big clash with the Hurricanes in Wellington next Friday night, with Damian McKenzie nursing a sore hip.
‘‘He would have carried on playing, but we don’t need to do that,’’ Cooper said. ‘‘It’s not as bad as we’re thinking, but we have to see tomorrow how it is.’’