Andre Bester

“The forwards were outstanding, our line out was outstanding, our mauling was outstanding and we scrimmaged them of the park. But I’ll tell you what was poor and that was the kicking, every kick was a disaster!

We get a penalty on halfway, we don’t kick it out and they come straight back and get a penalty, 3-0 down. Restarts! Our restarts were a disaster, every restart they had, they won, every restart we had we lost and then you ask yourself, “How does this work?”

I can’t point a finger at the forwards; I won’t point a finger at the forwards. They won all the line out’s, they put massive pressure on them and they scrummed them of the pitch.

How much ball did they have, did they have 30%? And where did they play, they played the whole time in our half, why, kicking. Their kicking was good and our kicking put us under pressure the whole time.

I knew this was going to happen, I knew we were going to hit the wall somewhere and I pointed out that this might be it. But we will learn from this in the long term.”

“We’ll have to have a stern look at ourselves, we never stood up today. We knew it was going to be a battle, we knew London Welsh were going to be up for it, but the last couple of weeks we haven’t started any of the games well. We’re starting to play in the second half, but that’s just not acceptable.

It allows opposition to come into the game and get a head start on you. We really have to look at ourselves and stand up to the challenge against Sedgley Park next week.

The backs will have days where they don’t kick that well and maybe today was one of them. But it’s hard because, fair enough the rolling maul is effective but then it’s slow ball for the backs.

We’re giving them a platform in the scrums – I thought our scrimmaging was good today – rolling mauls were good to an extent, but we’re not really giving the backs any options, its slow static ball.

So it’s hard on them, we really need to maybe go off the top a wee bit more and give them an opportunity to run the ball from all over the park, because we’ve got the players to do that.

It was maybe just an off day with the kicking with a couple of players, every player has an off day and I think we have to put this behind us and get on with preparing for Sedgley Park next week.

We’ve been striving all year to put in a flawless performance but it’s never going to be flawless. We have to go out there with ambition and a lot of pride, we just have to be patient and it will come. When we do click it will be fantastic rugby to watch.”