by EWT spoons on Fri May 03, 2019 9:18 am
Whilst I am disappointed with how the season has gone, some of the chat about Cockers being in trouble and the like, is insane. He had a great first season getting us into the playoffs and qualifying for the big cup, then in his second season we got to the quarter finals of the big cup. Sure our group turned out to be not quite as tough as was expected, but it’s still a good achievement. Our league position is disappointing, but we have to bear in mind this was only cockers second season.
He’s said repeatedly the work to turn Edinburgh around isn’t a 1,2 or 3 year plan, it’s probably going to be a lot longer, and taking into consideration how utterly inept we have been in the years before he took over, it’s hard to argue with that.
On the recruitment point mentioned previously, about why Glasgow have signed some better players than us. To me it’s fairly straightforward, Glasgow have won the ProXX, have been in contention to win it pretty much every year since, and play in the big cup. Up until this season we were out the big cup, and we’ve not really shown any hope of getting to, or doing anything in the playoffs. If you are a player looking to win stuff and improve yourself, which of the two clubs would appeal more. Clubs & players still see us as also-rans/plucky outsiders, and until we start winning more games and showing we deserve to be at the top table consistently then the level of player interested in coming to us is going to be lower than the ones who want to move to Glasgow.
With all this said, I think we need to see some tweaks to our style of play next season as teams have figured us out. They’ll know if they just flood the middle of the park and front up, we’re goosed, so with any luck some of the lads we’re bringing in for next season will help with this, but we will need to change our style of play as well. Look at Duhan, start of the season through to about the 6 nations, he was very good, getting the ball outwide and scoring tries. Since then though we’ve got narrower and narrower and now he can go through an entire game without touching the ball (literally happened a few weeks ago). So it’s all well and good having some exciting ball carriers in the team, but if they don’t see the ball then it’s pointless. I hope Cockers and Hodge factor this in and adapt the gameplan accordingly, otherwise we'll be in for a long season of grinding out a few results here and there but ultimately not achieving much.