Pat Lam was honest in his post-match appraisal, preferring to focus on Connacht's performance shortcomings rather than dwell on the vagaries of fortune in terms of injuries and refereeing decisions.
Connacht lost Craig Ronaldson to a quad strain in the warm-up and Dave McSharry to a head injury just before half-time. Ireland international Robbie Henshaw, meanwhile, played with a heavily strapped ankle after damaging the joint five minutes in.
“Yeah, if you look at it, four tries to three, 13-4 penalty count,” Lam said. “But the thing that killed us was the 20-plus turnovers. We had some wobbles at set-piece time, so if you can’t keep the ball, you can’t get field position.
“You’re defending a lot and they’re a big direct side. So the plan was to control the ball and apply some pressure, and we knew their defence would be flying up and we talked about looking where you’re passing.”
Woeful after the half
“So when you wrap all that up, after two losses, a lot of teams can lose a lot of belief. We have to be honest with ourselves and have a look at our performances as individuals and as a team. It’s a fine line and at 17-10 those 10 minutes after half-time were woeful. And again, how many balls did we turn over?
“When you turn over ball you have a scrum, you get pressure on you, you get a penalty against you and then they have field position. And all of those things apply pressure on the team.
“I think in the first 10 or 15 minutes our kicking wasn’t great. Even for the first try, we just hack-kicked it to the other side of the field and they put pressure on us. Some of our turnovers and our turnovers from our kicking meant that we had to spend a lot of time defending against them. And they’re big men.”
On the issue of the scrum, which saw the home side concede a penalty try: “I’ll leave that to Dan McFarland; he goes through that. I think it’s fair to say he’s pretty disappointed with effort there. But, again, our scrum has been pretty good. So we need to go back, and I have a lot of confidence that we’ll get that sorted.”
The penalty count also rankled, Lam acknowledged. “We’ll look at which were fair calls, which were hard calls.”
