Coventry rues missed opportunities

London Irish Head Coach, Tom Coventry, put his side’s loss at the hands of Edinburgh down to “critical errors”.

The Exiles travelled to Murrayfield on Friday night off the back of a convincing 38 – 6 win over the Pro 12 outfit last week in pool 5 of the Challenge Cup.

In a closely fought match it look as though London Irish were going to record back to back wins over Edinburgh with tries from Gerard Ellis and Tom Smallbone giving them the edge over a Tom Brown try and the boot of Sam Hidalgo-Clyne with ten minutes to go. However, a late try for John Hardie snatched a 18 – 15 win for the hosts and despite Irish picking a losing bonus point, Coventry was left to reflect on missed opportunities.

“Points are important and it is good we got the bonus point but I’ll look back on that another time,” said Coventry after the game.

“But right now its’ not what I’m thing about, we wanted to win. The performance was not good enough and we have a lot of work to do.”

The result leaves London Irish second in their pool, and despite a reasonable run in Europe, Coventry’s focus is still firmly on the Premiership where they are currently bottom.

“We sit at the bottom of the Premiership so it is all about where we are there, we need to get ourselves up the ladder, get some points, play a way that we are happy with and the crowd can get behind.

“I think for where we are at the moment, we have been growing,” he continued.

“We have come up to Edinburgh tonight with a different team from last week and it was good enough at times to do the job. We have a big squad and we are giving guys opportunities to play but we need to be better at clinching those opportunities.

“We had a number of chances tonight but we didn’t take them and that is something we need to do.

“Facing Northampton we need to build on what we have done well over the last two weeks against Edinburgh and we have done good things.”

A trip from last year’s Premiership table toppers on Boxing Day will be a tough test for the Exiles, but Coventry is confident if they get it right they can do some damage.

“We have scored tries against all the best teams in the competition but we have also let in a few. Our defence has been strong at various stages but we are a team that has to be good in all areas and aspects of the game to be competitive.

“At various times tonight parts of our game let us down at crucial times, we need to be good enough to get those crucial moments done.

“What I mean by that, we were attacking the goal line for the last five minutes but couldn’t get in a position to score – critical errors.”