EDINBURGH RUGBY have, admits head coach Richard Cockerill, always been good at producing the goods when they’re underdogs.
It is when they go into games as the favourites they have, in the past, sometimes found it harder to produce their best.
But Cockerill believes that this weekend, when Agen come to Murrayfield in the final group match of the Challenge Cup with a win for the capital club ensuring they will progress to the quarter-finals, being expected to win won’t be a problem.
On paper, a victory should be a mere formality for Edinburgh as the French side are winless in their five European games so far this season.
Cockerill knows that professional rugby doesn’t always go to plan but he believes his side are now at a point where they can produce the goods when they need to.
“The thing we’re very good at is if we’re underdogs and we’re up against a big team, we’re very good at motivating ourselves and getting up for the game,” the Englishman said.
“But we’re starting to mature as a team, and I think we are mature enough to be able to say: ‘This is a game we should win, it is a game we should be getting four tries in, and we are going to go out there and do it.’
“This is a different sort of challenge for us, and in some ways a harder challenge than people thinking we are going to lose and being surprised. Well, we should win (against Agen), I expect us to win, and I expect us to put a proper performance out on the field and get the job done.”
If Edinburgh do progress to the knock-out stages, they will be away from home for the quarter-finals and despite the Challenge Cup being the second tier of European competition, their prospective opponents are somewhat daunting.
But Cockerill has vowed to pick his strongest team if and when the quarter-finals come calling and he is not scared to take his team anywhere in Europe.
“We are going to be away from home but that’s fine. Wherever that takes us, we’ll give it our best shot,” he said.
“Bristol and Toulon are going well, we could end up in Castres or Leicester, so wherever we go in the quarter-final it is going to be tough – but you would prefer to avoid a Toulon or a Bordeaux, but if we have to go to those places we will go with our best team and see where we get to.”
Edinburgh are coming off the back of a somewhat disappointing result against Bordeaux last weekend, where they were fell to a 32-17 defeat at the Stade Chaban-Delmas.
However, Cockerill was not too despondent about the loss, particularly as if was not his strongest line-up. Problems with the line-out was something of a cause for concern but Cockerill is mindful of the youth of some of the players who made mistakes in Bordeaux and knows that kind of exposure will only serve to help them in the long-run.
“We’ve got two inexperienced locks, with Lewis Carmichael running it – maybe not for the first time but perhaps against that level of competition – and they’ve got a very good team with very good lien-out forwards,” the head coach said.
“So, some of our stuff we could have done better and some of their defence was very, very good.
“It is a good learning for those young guys to play under that sort of pressure – and we need to be better because it wasn’t good enough. The reality is that money buys the quality of squad they have and the depth they have, so they were just bigger and more powerful than us – so when we got things wrong, we got punished.”
Cockerill rates Bordeaux amongst some of the best sides in Europe currently and so despite the scoreline, he is happy with the lessons his side can take into this weekend’s clash with Agen and potentially the quarter-finals in due course.
“I was disappointed with parts of how we played (last weekend), but I was happy with lots of other parts,” he said.
“It’s a very tough place to go, and as a group we developed again, and learned some lessons as players, so if we go back there now we know what it feels like.
“Bordeaux might not be fashionable but they are a very good team. Name a better team than them in Europe at the moment in both the competitions? There aren’t many – Chiefs, Leinster – Bordeaux are in that company. And we probably should have beaten them here [at Murrayfield] if we had been a little bit smarter.”
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