Andre Bester

“You can’t play with refereeing like that; it makes it absolutely impossible to play. It’s a free for all, it’s a gamble, it’s like playing Russian roulette.

Every breakdown, every scrum, every tackle situation, we are coming from the back we don’t want to give penalties away and he nailed us left right and centre. Listen they kicked a ball into the crowd, picked another ball up and nearly scored a try, the guy’s clueless.

Our preparation was bad for this match today, the psyche wasn’t there. I told the players, you either abide by what I tell you in this place, or there won’t be a spot open to you in this place – it’s going to be too crowded here!

Here we have set the standards high and that wasn’t acceptable today. They weren’t only one point worse than us; we were a lot better than them. But individuals are destroying this team, all the effort that has been put in to create scoring opportunities and then individuals just go and do their own thing. Things that I say will never happen in my team.

We had players kicking ball away 10 and 15 yards from the line. Why would they do that, they’ve been told – they do it one more time and they can walk! They will do what I tell them they’re going to do and what we set out together what we’re going to do. And if we set something out, you don’t do your own thing and if you want to do your own thing, then you have to move on because there is no space for you here!

Great players are born, but there’s not that many around. Other players are being developed that way. We are trying to develop players to be great in the team set-up and that makes you a great player and then you start growing.

I cannot go with players doing those types of things and go into a 50-50 Premiership match. If one player does that again, he’ll never be picked for my team, never ever.

It’s well known what my view was with the early kick-off time. We shouldn’t expect players to set off at six O’clock in the morning to play a game of rugby. It’s just completely and utterly unacceptable and that had a big bearing on the performance. But I’ve sorted things out with the players in the dressing room and we’ve had a good face to face chat and the players know where they stand with me.

For me we are on target, the only thing is we were ahead of target two weeks ago. Now we’ve taken a backward step here and that is unacceptable to me.

The positive thing is, we can be shocking in our preparation and our build up to the match, think we can just turn up to win, have a shocking referee and yet still come away with a win. It just shows if we can get it right every time then the sky’s the limit.”

“I was really pleased to score my first try for Rotherham, Scotty Donald made the charge down, I picked up the loose ball and thankfully I had enough gas to score the try.

I think first half we played well to our patterns, we capitalized on their mistakes, but again we were giving away too many silly penalties. The referee was very strict, especially around the breakdown but at the same time we should know better. They just lived off our mistakes in the first half, as did we when they made mistakes. We picked up two tries off their mistakes.

The second half was disappointing; we possibly could have stretched our lead a wee bit more. We had penalty opportunities, but we said we were going to go for the bonus point. So we were kicking to the corners a lot more, whereas we probably would have kicked at the sticks another time.

At the end of the day it’s another win and four more points. But we’ve set our standards this season and in the second half we performed well below that. But it’s a win and if we can get a little bit of momentum going into the Doncaster game and pick up another win, then that will set us up very nicely for the rest of the season, hopefully top four.”

“If you’d asked me before the game for a one point victory, I would have taken it. Any away victory you’ll take in this league because if you were to predict most games, you’d tend to go for home victories – unless you’re Quins.

But our performance was poor, it was almost as bad as at Nottingham. To be fair I don’t know why that was, maybe the early kick off affected us. We couldn’t have our normal preparation, normally we’ll train in the morning but we couldn’t do that. On the whole it was a disappointing performance but having said that it’s still four points.

It’s a sign of a good team that can have a poor week and still get the result, but I was disappointed at not getting the bonus point having scored three tries in the first half. We’ll pick things up for next week’s game against Doncaster. After Harlequins, Doncaster is our next biggest game of the season!

Even though a lot of our squad hasn’t been in Yorkshire very long, there are aware of the rivalry between the two clubs. It’s a massive game and it’s one we all want to play in, it’s one we’ve all been looking forward to for a long time. It will be good to see and play against some of my old friends, but it will be good also to get a victory against them.

If there’s any punches flying about and “Bunny’s” around I’m just going to run! It’ll be good to play against those old boys, I’m sure they’ll put in a good performance but I’m quietly confident we’ll get a good victory next week and a good crowd.”