WHAT doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, was the philosophy being adopted by the relentlessly positive Mike Blair after watching his Edinburgh team scrape a narrow home win over United Rugby Championship whipping boys Zebre on Friday evening
The 29-26 victory – with a bonus point – wasn’t secured until the 77th minute when Jaco van der Walt slotted a not-rolling-away penalty against the plucky Italians, who had lost all 13 of their previous games played in this URC campaign by an average of just under 25 points per match.
A draw would have been a major blow to the Scottish side’s chances of finishing in the top four of the URC table, which will secure a home draw in the end of season play-offs. As it stands, Edinburgh sit sixth in the league with two rounds of matches in the regular season left to play, against Ulster at home next Saturday and currently fifth placed Glasgow Warriors on May 21st.
The capital men also have a European Challenge Cup quarter-final clash against English giants Wasps coming up in two weekends’ time, and Blair explained that he will be focussing on the positives next week as he looks to inspire a dramatic improvement in performance.
“We will be right up for the game next week. I believe it will be the first sell-out at the DAM Health and the crowd are going to really be behind us and we’re going to put a performance on the pitch that they’re going to be proud of,” promised Blair, speaking straight after the Zebre match.
“We did score early tonight but I think we relaxed a bit after that. Our physicality around the breakdown, and in attack and in defence, was missing a little bit, and that has huge implications for how you’re trying to win the game.
“It was disappointing, but it could have been worse. We got five points and we’ll come in on Monday and have a real focus on Ulster.”
Blair added that he has learned from experience that giving players the hairdryer treatment is not necessarily the way to achieve the sort of reaction he is looking for next week.
“They got the bollocking at half-time and that didn’t work [because Zebre scored and then Edinburgh conceded a red card within minutes of the restart],” he pointed out. “I want us to learn from the good game management we showed – what did we do well and how did we allow ourselves to win the game?
“I don’t want to push too much on the negative side because that’s plain and obvious to see. The target was to get five points out of it. We made it really hard for ourselves, we played a lot of the game with 14 men, and we came out with the five points.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here