NICK KENNEDY says London Irish must improve defensively.
The Exiles conceded 45 points in defeat to Northampton Saints at Madejski Stadium this afternoon, taking their overall points against tally for the season to 142.
And the director of rugby says Irish have to tighten up at the back.
On making a slow start…
For the third week in a row we just gave ourselves a bit of a mountain to climb against a very good team. We made it very difficult for ourselves again. Nothing consistent with the defence, it’s lots of different things that were hurting us.
On if the problems are easy to fix…
Our overall work without the ball needs to improve. A few different areas that we just need to put more time into and get better quicker at it.
On fixing the slow start…
I can’t put my finger on it personally. After the last three weeks if I could put my finger on it I’d have fixed it for this week. You have to give credit to the other teams. They’ve come out firing and they’ve scored a couple of decent tries. That’s the last three weeks.
On confidence…
We’ve conceded a lot of points but we were very aware how hard it was going to be. We didn’t get too high after winning the first one. We knew it was a huge step up and we knew it was going to be a very tough season. The boys have been excellent in training. They’ve brought loads of energy and they’ve been great. Already we’re looking forward to Friday night (away to Newcastle). We’ll work this week on what we need to improve and we’ll head up there raring to go.
On having a good spell after the two early tries…
I thought we did well in attack whenever we looked after the ball we looked dangerous. I thought the boys worked hard in attack, the guys we brought into the team did well in getting us over the gain line and we end up coughing up the ball, even towards the end there on the far side and then they go the length so it was frustrating yeah.
On taking the positives…
We need to shore up our defence, especially in the early exchanges and not give ourselves a mountain to climb like we’ve done in the last few weeks.
On how long it will take to adjust to the Premiership…
I think that’s a difficult queston to give a specific amount of weeks or games, I don’t have that answer. I think the important thing is that we learn our lessons along the way and that we keep improving. Certain areas of our game have improved. Although we won the Harlequins game, if we just look at performances, we were off it in a few areas there and we’ve actually improved from there if you take straight wins and losses out. It’s clear to see on the scoreboard that our defence needs work so that’s up to me. I need to give it more time to look at specific things that went wrong today and make sure we fix them and that we learn our lessons along the way.
