General thoughts
That's the goal everyone sets out for at the start of pre-season training as a minimum to be in the play-offs. To be there is a good result, it's been a tough year for players and staff alike, a few bumps in the road, the work started last November has accumulated to get to this point.
I said it a few weeks ago, there are a lot of parts of our sport that are about being brave, tough, pushing through adversity and fatigue and for most of the game we did that stuff really well. But we lacked any fluency again and didn't respect the ball. But our energy was good on the back of a turnaround and after the travel as well is somewhat difficult. It was a good battle and probably great for a neutral fan.
It was probably skill in the end that got us a couple of tries. It certainly wasn't going to be character that would let us down if we didn't find the tries, it was going to be skill, execution and decision-making that still let us down but we found a couple of moments that were enough. We knew it was going to be a scrap today. I didn't anticipated it would be like that but I knew it would be a tough, hard game.
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Ash Handley injury
He's got a decent ankle injury. I'd say he won't be playing next week.
Catalans in the play-offs
It will be our fourth trip to south of France in seven or eight weeks. It was interesting scheduling you would say that the three fixtures in France all fell in the middle of summer but we've embraced the heat each time. We'll look forward to that. I'd imagined it will still be warm.
Did he think the game was done?
No and that's honest. I was frustrated and generally I don't get frustrated, I'm usually looking for the answer or a bit of wisdom to get to the bench to help somebody but I didn't have much today other than the obvious to end our sets with composure. We scrambled enough to keep them out and when you concede one try it's usually a good defensive performance.
I said after the penalty goal to the analyst sat next to me I thought we'd still score two tries as I felt our energy was good and we took a boost from only needing one score.
Was it his call to go for the penalty at 8-0 down?
I did about 28 times and they were still not, every time I've been here when we've got a penalty in front of the posts everyone has looked to the bench to ask what was going on and nobody did today and the message was clearly to kick the goal. We were struggling to get one score so to take an easy one made sense to me.
Brad Dwyer
He banged knees pretty hard with someone. Initially they can feel really bad and he was struggling to get going. He was wanting to get through it but at that period of the game we needed something to happen. Sometimes you can let players take time to get their injury sorted and run through it but we didn't have that time at that point so we made the change. I don't think it's anything serious.
Is the lack of attacking cohesion a concern
Every time we've had settled teams something happens then we have three short turnarounds in a row. We've done very little teamwork, the focus has been on restoring energy and refreshing our heads and body. We've been doing that over a long period of time, we've effectively been playing sudden death footy and as it turned out, on reflection, had we dropped any we'd have been in strife. We've done a really good job of being fresh enough but our cohesion has fallen to bits. We'll have to rely on rolling up the sleeves and grinding away next week. It's not going to get pretty in six days time.
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