By Paul Smith 
Coventry Rugby head coach Alex Rae reports that spirits are good ahead of his team’s round 20 Championship clash with Nottingham (Butts Park Arena, Saturday 3pm kick off).
Although Cov have suffered four consecutive league defeats, their boss says maintaining a calm, clear-thinking approach is the best method to resume winning ways.
“Losing games and having the occasional bad run of results is part-and-parcel of being in professional sport,” he said.
“It’s been our worst run during the four years I’ve been at the club and that speaks volumes about the journey we’ve been on and how we’ve performed.
“I’ve always believed that those people who are very up and down and living on an emotional rollercoaster tend not to find much success so we’re staying very level-headed about it all.
“If you watch last week’s game back, even though Doncaster are on a nine-game unbeaten run now it was a match we could and perhaps should have won.
“There were a lot of positives from Saturday for me so there’s no screaming and shouting from us, we’re staying very level and concentrating on preparing to play Nottingham.
“Players all react differently to losing games and to being on a bad run. You have some who are sulkers and others who stick their chests out and get on with it and my job is to point out the positives and show them the way we want to go.
“This is a new week against new opposition and we’re determined that we will finish strongly in front of our fans in these last two home games and in between go to Ealing and give it a really good go.”
Nottingham are familiar opponents for Coventry who claimed a Premiership Rugby Cup double over the Archers but suffered defeat in the league at Lady Bay in December.
But according to Rae this week’s focus has been internal rather than looking in detail at Saturday’s visitors.
“Nottingham are on a worse run than us so this weekend we’ll have two teams that badly need a win,” he said.
“We’ve played them three times this season and won twice. No disrespect to Nottingham who are a dangerous team but we have really only focused on ourselves in training this week.
“I’m sure they have areas where they think they can attack us but we feel the same way and we’ve been preparing to try and use what we’ve seen to expose them.
“We’ve really focused in-house on the things that we can control and do well and we’re confident that a good performance will follow. As everyone saw last week at Doncaster for 40 minutes when we get things right we score points so we’re focusing now on delivering an 80-minute performance.”
Tickets for Cov’s home game against Nottingham on Saturday May 17th can be purchased at https://www.coventryrugby.co.uk/tickets/matchday-tickets/
