By John Wilkinson COVENTRY went down to a second successive 33-24 away defeat, but director of rugby Rowland Winter drew a number of positive from the side’s performance yesterday as they pushed Plymouth Albion all the way.
Cov led twice and were within a point of their hosts at 25-24 going into added time before a late flurry from Plymouth sent them home empty handed.
“We’ve questioned lots of stuff in the last couple of weeks and we’ve had games against Esher and Fylde where our guts and determination, our passion for the team, just wasn’t there,” said Winter. “But today we had that in abundance and we were scrapping for everything we got,
“The detail wasn’t in our game, and that’s something we can work on and improve, but we asked for a performance and we got that.
“It’s not about league points at this stage, it’s about coming here and putting in a performance and largely I’m happy with what they’ve done.
“That’s an improvement on the last couple of weeks across the board, the boys were fighting for everything, and I’m proud of some of what we’ve seen.
“We’ve got to make sure that when we come back down here next year we’re in a better position and today has set that up, we’ve got something to work on there.
”The process is well under way and this week we will be announcing our first two new signings for next season.”
Added Winter: “When we’ve got the ball we look dangerous and today we were making holes, but we’ve got to make sure we get the detail right in the set piece to win possession. Our driving line-out was good, we got a couple of tries off that, but in terms of the line-out as a platform, it wasn’t good enough.
“Two yellow cards didn’t help, but I’m not sure we got the rub of the green with the amount of penalties we were creating and not getting anything our way.
“We’ll pick ourselves up and work hard to make sure we get things right at home to Hull Ionians next Saturday.”
