NOT GOOD ENOUGH

Young’s brutal assessment after Cardiff’s drubbing in Ulster

DAI Young has delivered a starkly honest assessment of what he has labelled by far the worst performance from his team since he has been back in charge at Cardiff Rugby.

Young watched on as his team leaked seven tries in going down to a 48-12 hammering at the hands of Ulster in a United Rugby Championship clash at Belfast’s Kingspan Stadium on Friday night.

He didn’t pull any punches after the match, describing the basic skills as “awful”, the tackling as just not good enough and admitting the

Arms Park outfit had let themselves down.

The former Wales and Lions prop says everyone in the set up - both players and coaches - need to look at themselves as they prepare to head out to South Africa for back-to-back URC matches.

Reflecting on the heavy defeat to Ulster, he said: “It’s far by the worst performance since I’ve been here.

“I didn’t see it coming, to be quite honest.

“I knew it would be tough because we haven’t played for five weeks.

“But that’s certainly not an excuse for some of the skills we demonstrated. You can’t hide from the fact it was a real poor performance.

“The more disappointing aspect was our execution of basic skills. Our catch and pass skills were awful.

“We pride ourselves on our oneup tackles which just weren’t good enough.

“And we turned over the ball 10 times in the first 25 minutes, six of those off first phase.

“You are never going to put teams under pressure like that. Ulster hardly had to make a tackle for 30 minutes. We didn’t stress them out at all.

“We couldn’t really build anything due to our poor basic skills.

“We made all the basics look really difficult and we made the real easy things look really hard, which is really disappointing.”

He continued: “We just lacked any sort of spring in our step. We looked really flat right across the board.

“We just weren’t on the edge like we have been previously.

“We were out of shape, out of structure, stepping away from policies.

“We were put under pressure and our game cracked.

“I said beforehand that if we play like we can play it’s going to take a good team to beat us.

“Ulster are a good team, but they didn’t have to be that good, to be honest, because I don’t think we pushed them at all.

“We didn’t make them work as much as we would like and we let ourselves down.”

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