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Vern Cotter makes telling admission after messy Drua win
at Eden Park, Auckland
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Blues head coach Vern Cotter has provided both positives and negatives after his side’s 40-15 victory over the Fijian Drua in Auckland, where his team’s second-half performance was the difference in round seven.
Glen Jackson’s Drua certainly made the home side work for it, and the two-point difference at halftime told the full story of a physical and absorbing 40 minutes.
Both teams were forced to make numerous tackles as they built long phases, but Cotter’s outside backs turned it on in the second half, scoring a couple of counter-attack five-pointers.
Despite finishing the game positively, the Blues’ head coach was quick to examine his own side’s performance to understand why they had another slow start.
“It was a tough game and I thought we probably kept them in it for longer than necessary through our handling errors and little bits of in-accuracy,” Cotter told media in Auckland.
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“I think we probably breached seven or eight times, but lost the ball following a breach was when you really needed to put it away. But they were tenacious, and they stuck in there.
“So half time we had to come together and just be really pragmatic about how to get back into the game and put them under pressure and work for 80 minutes.
“I mean, it’s always a danger the week before the bye that you take your foot off the accelerator a little bit and try and do it in an easy manner. But these boys came together and decided, i’s going to be hard but they worked our way through it.”
Cotter credited the Drua’s attacking ability, noting that if you don’t get it right, Jackson’s side is dangerous.
“As the second half developed, I thought we’re able to vary our attack. I thought we got better on defence and wore them down, and they’re a tough team to play. If you don’t get it right, they can hurt you and we saw that in the first half.”
But after the Blues struggled early on in the season to close out games against both the Chiefs and the Brumbies, Cotter’s side now seems to have a lingering first-half issue, where they start slower than expected.
For the departing Blues head coach, he said that it’s not a major concern, and it’s more a showcase of how the team is growing.
“I think you’ve just got to be patient and have an understanding of what you’re doing, and recognise when you can put pressure on teams and when you lean the pressure off,” Cotter said post-match at Eden Park.
“And I think that’s this team’s growing and learning, because we’ve been able to adjust now for the last three or four weeks so and then I think that brings belief.
“I don’t mind if we’re building towards the end of the game and still getting the wins. We had a couple of slow finishes in the beginning of the season so I think there’s an improvement there.
“Because with the Chiefs it was a game that got away from us at the end, Brumbies as well, and now I think we’re finishing stronger and finding a way. So the key, is always finding a way and keep moving forward.”
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