In the match programme, Doug Struth, Gareth Baber and yours truly all warned Edinburgh about complacency in connection with this fixture. I’m sure that message had also been delivered to the players and that they took it on board. However the lovely try that Edinburgh scored within the first minute as a result of a neat chip through by Kinghorn I reckon dismantled all of that. I know I was like, this is going to be easy, after that score and I don’t imagine there were any observers who thought differently.
I also mentioned I didn't envy Mike Blair his selection dilemma based on the amount of rugby these guys were going to have to negotiate. In hindsight it did seem like we were stripped of some key elements but when all is said and done it was still a 5 point win which was what was ordered.
Let's take a look at the good points and bad points.
The two cards definitely fall into the bad category. Glen Young’s was perhaps unfortunate and in the cold light of day he would have been better to have just shepherded the attacking player into the corner and the result would have been 5pts with a tricky conversion and 15 still on the park. Easy to say, not so easy to do.
Sykes red was a real brain fart and there was no need for it at all.
The injury to Angus Williams is offset by the imminent return of WP Nel but we are still down another tighthead and the fact that Henry Immelman was at the ground in a leg brace is worrying but we now have a suspension looming for Sykes. We may be well stocked in the second row department but we could still do without more enforced absences at this point of the season.
I think the altercation to the backline also cost us some cohesion. Add to that the chopping and changing between 10 and 15, depending on attack or defence, was perhaps a step too far. The players clearly aren't dummies but maybe adding to their mental workload wasn’t a good idea.
Mark Bennett’s second try on the night was a cracker but with the way the night was going I think we could all have done without the TMO review of the grounding. One finger in contact with the ball was Frank Murphy’s assessment but there was just no need and given the context perhaps a dive with the ball secured in two hands was more what was needed or at the very least not carrying the ball in the hand nearest to the tackler.
The drama around this was almost like a distilled version of the game at large, It could have gone badly wrong but just about didn’t.
In the plus column. There was another very hard working performance from Pierre Schoeman but for me the player of the match award should have gone to Ben Muncaster. He put in a huge shift and along the way beat more defenders than anyone on the pitch. I expect he’ll be the Peak Performer when that's circulated on Social media this week.
Overall though to play 50 minutes with only 14 men and to only concede 8 penalties and come away with the win is laudable. We have had off days before this season and before Friday those usually resulted in defeat. We are clearly learning and will take a lot of confidence in how we ground out that win in an adverse scenario. It’s easy to be cynical here but this win keeps the season on track.
Speaking of on track here are the games that the teams in contention for playoffs have and how I think it will all come out in the wash.
Wins in blue.
Huge amounts of conjecture. Worth mentioning that I’m 139th out of 383 Edinburgh fans on Superbru for predictions but at least you can see who has got what and what Edinburgh will probably need to do to get a home tie in the knockout phase.
I wasn’t able to be at the game on Friday evening and going through the social media I saw this post -
If that's not a deliberate choice then it's a helluva coincidence that this song was chosen when the visiting team was from Italy. Funny? Not so much. Disrespectful? Probably.. There was a second song that followed Thats Amoré and that was Luna Mezzo Mare from The Godfather. Given the way the way the game had gone perhaps the if we were in film score mode then the theme music from The Great Escape might have been more apt.
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