IT has not been hard to find people ready to write off the European Challenge Cup, the second-tier tournament, but, as far as Alan Solomons, the Edinburgh head coach, is concerned, it is a vital element in his team's season and they are determined to capitalise on their winning start.
Three games in and they have a 100 per cent record, but, as Solomons points out, it is still far too early to be counting any chickens. The players demonstrated as much with a woeful first-half performance last weekend, before they recovered to score twice in the final quarter and rescue the game. Now they face the same opponents, London Welsh, in the away tie and cannot afford a repeat of such inconsistency.
"This is the secondary competition but it is still has some very, very good sides in it," he said. "It still has value, any competition the team plays in is important. Getting to a play-off would be a big positive for the team but we are a very long way from that. Bordeaux are a very, very good side and we still have to travel to London Welsh and Lyon, so we still have three big games to play, there are no easy games for us. We have a good enough side and if we produce the right performance we will get the result. It is important we keep alive our aspirations in Europe, but to do that, we know we need to put in 80 minutes of rugby not 40 minutes, as we did last week."
He has his problems. Hopes that Ross Ford and David Denton, two of his internationalists, would have recovered enough to take part in this game have proved over-optimistic adding to an injury list that is only slowly coming down from the catastrophic level it was at last month.
He is hoping that both should be back next week, while Hamish Watson, the flanker who broke his jaw in October, is less than a fortnight away from a return to training. Others from the casualty list, including Grant Gilchrist, who was named as Scotland captain three days before breaking his arm, should then dribble back into contention during January.
As Solomons pointed out, when he was in a position to field something resembling Edinburgh's strongest team, they were good enough to win in Bordeaux, who were fourth in the Top 14 in France when the teams met. So if the players on duty this week are good enough to maintain the unbeaten run against a team that have not won this season, he is confident that the return of the more experienced contingent will be enough to make them competitive as the pool stage reaches its climax and in the knockout games that should then follow.
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