Henry Pyrgos will use his World Cup experience to make him a better player, but the scrum-half admits he is delighted to get back to club rugby and is relishing the chance to help Edinburgh maintain the impressive form they have shown this season.
Pyrgos spent pre-season with Edinburgh before getting a late call-up to the Scotland World Cup squad due to an injury to Ali Price.
It may not have turned out to be the World Cup campaign Pyrgos nor his compatriots wanted, but there will be lessons learnt from the tournament.
“Japan, away from the result at the end, it’s a great place to go, a great country and personally it’s great to have been involved at a World Cup," the 30-year-old said.
"You have a lot of good memories to look back on but obviously from a team performance it was disappointing, we had much higher expectations but that’s sport sometimes. It didn’t go how we wanted it to.
"Individually you’re always looking at your previous performance. You look at what you can do better and try to move on to next week. If I’m involved in the 6 Nations I think we’ll look back on certain areas that were key to us as a team, and we’ll take the learning from that.”
During Pyrgos’ absence from his club side, Edinburgh won three of their opening four Pro14 games, including a particularly impressive 46-7 victory over Scarlets last weekend, which Pyrgos came back into the side for. Initially he was due to be a replacement but when Nic Groom dropped out after his wife went into labour and he admitted he was delighted with how his return went.
“It’s great to get back in, the season’s started and watching out in Japan the guys are going really well. I’ve jumped back and forth this pre-season but it was really good to get back in with the boys last week, and nice to have a good result,” he said.
Currently, Edinburgh sit in third place in the Pro14 Conference B, just a point behind leaders Connacht. They travel to Treviso to take on Benetton on Saturday and having been defeated by the Italians last season, there is no hint of complacency.
But with Edinburgh playing a more expansive brand of rugby this season, the look they have the potential to be at the business end of things in the Pro14 come the end of the season.
“I think over the last few years there’s things we’ve done very well but where we’ve finished, there’s a lot of improvement needed in our game if we’re to get to the next level,” Pyrgos said.
“We’re definitely improving and we’ve had some really good results, but it’s still early days and there are a lot of challenges to come. But Scarlets are a quality team and they were 3-0, so it was a good statement against them. But it only really matters if you turn up this weekend and put in another quality performance. It’s a really competitive league at the moment, and as we found out last year it’s hard to play Treviso away, so we need to back it up.”
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