By John Wilkinson FORWARDS coach Louis Deacon attributed Coventry’s problems at Old Albanian to a failure to respond to the home side’s ‘cup final’ approach and their own lack of control.
Cov came away with a 21-19 win to remain unbeaten, but were far from convincing in a performance which left plenty of food for thought.
““It’s frustrating because we did lack control,” said Deacon. “I think it was a cup final for Old Albanians, it was their big game, they wanted to upset the odds, I suppose. They threw everything at us and we didn’t really know how to deal with it and control it.
“Obviously the weather is a leveller on days like that, but we generally need to be better than we were in all aspects of the game.
“Our set piece was okay, late in the game we had scrum dominance and our line-out functioned well, but we didn’t get the rewards we probably deserved from that and it probably comes back to needing a bit of control at the critical points.
“We didn’t control field position and probably played too much in the wrong areas, and we lost the breakdown. You need to have a strong set piece, but it’s not always about that.
“Our defence was good, but they had more energy than us and we were always second best in the race to get to the breakdown and we didn’t deal with it. That’s the frustration really and it’s particularly disappointing.”
Added Deacon: “It’s a rocket for us that we almost probably needed. We’re a big, physical team and we weren’t physical on Saturday.
“Whether we thought it was going to be easy, I’m not sure, but as I’ve said before it just shows that if you’re not right on your game and your performance level drops, as soon as you drop below that level of consistency you struggle, and we did that here.”
