By John Wilkinson DIRECTOR of rugby Rowland Winter felt Coventry were fortunate to escape with a win, but applauded the character of the side to come from nine points down in stoppage time to snatch a 43-42 victory over Old Albanian.
“We were lucky to win the game – by a long way, we didn’t deserve to in my opinion,” said Winter after a heart-stopping finish to the game at Butts Park Arena.
“But last week some people questioned whether we’ve got passion and desire to play and work for the club. I didn’t question that, I questioned whether we were good enough. There were a few times today when we weren’t, but we stuck in there and that’s what it’s about.
“It was a good character-building exercise today, and to come back from nine points down with a few minutes to go, get the try and then the opportunity to scrum – which is an area which didn’t work perfectly well last week but is a big weapon for us – and force the penalty to win the game, to me definitely shows character, passion and desire to play for the shirt.”
Added Winter: “Attack’s not our problem, we were quite fluent – We made a few handling errors, a couple of passes we should have made we didn’t and held on to the ball, but we attacked so many times and found so much space that scoring tries wasn’t going to be our problem.
“But our defence needs a lot of attention – it’s an area where we’ve been improving, and today we’ve gone backwards in that.
“Our discipline wasn’t good and that comes from poor defence. We were stretched in defence, we weren’t getting into position quickly enough and then our tackles were too high. When that happens they get the front foot, and that just puts more pressure on us and at times we got on the wrong side of the referee.
“There were other areas which weren’t as we would have liked and we’ve got a lot to work on, but for me nothing has changed and we remain a project, a work in progress.
“We’ve moved forward a couple of steps and then we’ve come back a couple of steps, and that’s what developing a new team is all about.
“Defence is a clear area to work on, I think we can put attack aside for a couple of sessions next week and focus on that. But I think that if we wanted to defend as much as we want to attack , it wouldn’t be an issue.”
