It was good to pick up the 2 points and a lot of the squad will get 12 days rest now. A lot of them have played without any rotation for the past 10 weeks or so (westwood, roberts, lineham, hughes etc)
The problem that i see is that when an opposition team raises their intensity we struggle to cope.
If you watch the second half against cas there was a 10 minute spell where they were flying out of the line and putting a lot of effort in defence. The pressure took its toll as players that dont normally make errors (cooper) were put under pressure and made errors. This was compounded by then giving away penalties as cas were running the ball harder and we were struggling to dominate in the tackle.
Teams will try to up the tempo and put us under pressure but if we are struggling to make yards we need to be cool and just deal with it and get to the kick. Teams cannot maintain that intensity for prolonged periods so you just have to see it through and be calm about it. We panic and produce errors and penalties which just lets teams back in the game. As the games become more important with qualifiers and semi finals this will happen more and more, we just need more composure when the opposition raise their game.
Rather than give away a penalty for holding down i would prefer the defence to just get back the 10m. Hold the line and dont bother moving up on the next play so that we concede 10 yards rather than 30 yards and another set of six.
