I walk this empty street, on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams…
I had hoped to write one more match report after this one, but it was not to be.
I’ve been sitting on this for a few days, and I think I’m still too emotionally drained to write a full report.
We were outthought and outplayed. Leicester exploited our biggest weakness: a propensity to fall apart in the face of an ultra-aggressive defence. A defence that exists permanently – shall we say? – millimetres onside; but you have to play what the referee allows. Too often, when faced with this sort of rush, we start panicking and trying to force things. Instead of finding ways to recover the situation, we make it worse by going offside ourselves and piling the pressure on.
Honestly, my priority if I were a coach looking at next season would be to find ways of responding to the type of defence that Tigers threw at us and working out how to counter it or, at least, survive intact until they wear themselves out.
Over the last five seasons, we’ve finished 3rd, 6th, 2nd, 3rd and 3rd. Not bad for a team that spent the previous decade and more hovering in and out of Champions’ Cup qualification and even flirted with relegation, only being saved by London Welsh being docked points for fielding ineligible players (IIRC).
To turn nearly fifteen years of being also-rans into a consistently top-four team is, I maintain, something to be proud of. It takes a bit of time, I assume, to get used to the heady heights of being A Good Team™. At the moment, we’re a team that gets there through sheer bloody-mindedness in the face of a few horrendous slip-ups among the wins. We need to eliminate those aberrations and achieve more consistency: if you’re going to lose, lose well and get a couple of bonus points out of it.
Is it a coincidence that the time we did get to the final was the year we sat in second place from round four onwards? No panic, no pressure to win and march up the table from the pits at Christmas.
We were hardly, if ever, out of the top four for the whole of the 2020-21 season, too. That year, we failed for two reasons: we lacked the experience, and we had to go away to Exeter. I honestly feel that, if we had ended up third this season, but had been in the top four all the way like back then, we’d have won. But we had to travel to Leicester, having come off of seven or eight physically and emotionally draining matches. I don’t care how bullish you are about it, that’s very, very difficult.
I don’t buy all this stuff about that charge up the table giving us momentum, either. Momentum comes from being consistently there or thereabouts all the way, not pounding uphill on tired legs.
If – and it’s a big if – we can start well next season and maintain a consistent top four position, then I genuinely think we can go all the way. However, bugger up a few games and drop down to the bottom half again, and I think we’re in for another year of “so near, and yet so far”.
So, that’s it for another season, bar the summaries. I’ll have a look back over this campaign in a couple of weeks, but in the meantime, there’s a final to watch. I’ll be vaguely supporting Leicester, but only – and I want to stress this – only because the alternative is B*th.
an old grey dog 