I think this shows just how tight the league is this year. I’ve long maintained (in chats with friends, families and a handful of other rugby fans I work with) that it’s an incredibly competitive league and our issues have been small but compounded rather than fundamental...
- Fitness (or a lack of amongst the squad in general)
- Consistency of Teamsheet and combinations
- Confidence
- Mindset of Lima (interesting snippet this week on The Rugby Pod with him saying that he’s changed his mindset and that’s been the big limiting factor for him and something he’s looking forward to putting right at the end of the season and the beginning of next - He felt, wrongly or rightly, that rugby is rugby wherever you play and he’d be able to easily transfer his skillset and style from S15 to the Premiership but found it more intense, more physical, more competitive and increasingly unrelenting with a constant flow of competitions to navigate).
There’s a core group of naysayers on DWs who have constantly shouted down anyone who felt that we were in a relegation battle, or that Lima didn’t care and it might have been more than a physical commitment issue for him, or that Dai was a waste of space, or that our defence system was flawed rather than our commitment to the system etc etc...
It’s not to say it’s all rosy and the injury list continues to worry me, but we’ve had a couple of narrow losses in games we should have won - I think about Leicester away and Sale at home. Had we of won just one of those games (i.e. Alo’s try gets given by JP at Welford Road) and we’re sitting pretty in 4th.
We’ve also recruited pretty well (I think - I’m happy with Fekitoa and Minozzi as replacements for Daly and WLR) and hopefully by the start of the season some of the negative press that is looming is resolved (CCFC and the FCA investigation although i’m slightly more worried about the latter than the former).
The Quins game will be huge for us - aside from a bitter rivalry, there’s also the prospect that it could effectively be a play-off game in it’s own right for 4th place.