The Rugby Paper

Hooper tells his players to shape up

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BATH director of rugby Stuart Hooper accepted his side need to take a hard look at themselves after this horror show.

Hooper said: “We’ve obviously got work to do as we are a long way from what we are capable of delivering.

“As individual­s they need to look at their game as there is no point in trying to hide behind this.

“We had everything thrown at us with changes and decisions but we still need to be a lot better than that.

“We lost our two lineout forwards but that’s not going to cover up our deficienci­es as the scoreboard told the story.

“Whoever we have on the field, we expect more than that. We stepped out of line in defence and it proved costly as we didn’t rely on each other to do the right thing at the right time.”

Despite their emphatic win, Bristol director of rugby, Pat Lam, still had reservatio­ns about their performanc­e.

He said: “We played like a team in the first half but we played as individual­s in the second.

“Before the interval we worked hard for each other but after that we became average and ended up defending for periods of time.

“We defended well but we shouldn’t have been defending at all as we lost a bit of control.”

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