SOMETIME over the next day or two, Richard Cockerill will sit down and analyse the recording of Edinburgh’s dispiriting 18-17 defeat on Friday night. After he does, he might be tempted to ring up the SRU and ask them to tear up the head coach contract he signed only a few days ago.
He won’t actually make that call of course, but if he needed a reminder of the scale of the task ahead, this game was it – even though Edinburgh played pretty well for almost an hour.
The biggest worry has to be the mental frailty that saw them disintegrate from a winning position, leading by 11 points going into the final quarter and, at that stage, looking more likely to score a fourth try to claim five vital league points than to fall apart.
If it had been the other way round – a slow start that gradually improved – you might have wondered if the announcement of Cockerill’s appointment had been a distraction for the players, but according to Glenn Bryce, who was playing centre in this game, the change of leadership for next season has hardly been mentioned.
“We were not really talking about it much, we were much more focused on the game,” he said. “It is tough for everyone but we have to dust ourselves down and get ready to face the Ospreys next week.”
In reality, they were obviously switched on from the start and despite playing into a stiff wind were leading 7-6 at half time after Neil Cochrane’s maul try. Two more tries for Rory Scholes, the wing, seemed to put them in the driving seat until they stopped holding on to the ball, started kicking it to Cardiff and paid the price when the visitors ran in two tries to snatch the narrowest of wins.
“The first half, playing into that strong wind, I thought we did really well,” said Bryce. “The second half, we were playing really well and playing the conditions until mistakes and basic errors let them back into the game. A team like Cardiff will take those opportunities. The boys did really well for so long, we are bitterly disappointed to have lost in the end.
“Once we got a couple of tries, the boys were getting going but it was just errors that let them back in. It is an 80-minute game.”
That will be the big lesson Cockerill will have taken and the big test for his leadership. When he was director of rugby at Leicester he rarely had to deal with the kind of mental frailty that Edinburgh demonstrated – it was almost as though they were finding it harder to deal with the pressure of being in front than the pressure of another defeat.
Most of the skills were there, as they showed for the first hour, but when it mattered they switched them off.
Perhaps the players should be thinking a bit more about their new boss. He has a reputation as a hard taskmaster and it is difficult to see any coach accepting that level of psychological weakness as he forges his side.
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