John Barclay: ‘You don’t lose seven in a row by being unlucky’

Published on 18/03/2012 00:00

OUR dressing room after the match was a pretty sombre place to be, as you can imagine. There was no shouting by Andy Robinson, as he didn’t need to tell us that once again we had not put in the performance required of us.

To finish bottom of the stack means one thing for certain – individually and collectively we will all do a lot of soul-searching now at the end of a Six Nations tournament in which we made too many mistakes. We have been unlucky at times, yes, but you do not lose seven games in a row, as we have now done, just by being unlucky. There’s much more than luck to winning matches and we need to find out how to start winning again.

We have already heard the calls for Andy Robinson to go, and he will understand that is the nature of the beast when you are in charge. The press and commentators will always have a go at him when we lose, but ultimately it was us, the players, who were out on the pitch making the mistakes in recent weeks. We have to take responsibility for what has happened.

The overwhelming feeling that I had about the match was that we just never got a rhythm going. The Italians played their game and we just never got the possession we needed to build an attacking rhythm.

We did not create enough in their 22, and only had a few rucks there, but you can’t build attacks if you don’t have the ball and we simply didn’t get enough ball.

In the first half in particular, they had all the ball and most of the territorial advantage but this time our defence was solid and to go in 3-3 at half-time was the proof that we had defended well. I even managed to charge down one kick, but it did not make that much difference to the game.

We had the worst possible start to the second half, and once again we were not able to get any sort of rhythm going.

Throughout the match our lineout was very poor, and that is very disappointing as we had worked hard on that part of our game and it had been going pretty well until yesterday.

We knew the Italians would be formidable in the scrum, and to lose Allan Jacobsen just minutes before the match was a blow, but I thought Jonny Welsh did a super job as his very late replacement.

Jonny literally only found out he was playing just a minute or so before we trooped out, as I heard the referee giving us the minute’s warning just as he was being told what was happening. To go on and play as he did and make that sort of impact was one of our few plus points. He has had to wait his turn, but I thought he did very well.

Once again we had players yellow-carded, and I must say I thought the sin-binning of Jim Hamilton was wrong, but we can’t blame defeat on that either.

Looking back over the tournament there have been positive things such as the emergence of young players like Dave Denton, but there’s no denying that to finish bottom is massively disappointing.

Now the squad members will disperse back to their clubs and for the guys from Edinburgh there’s the huge excitement of a Heineken Cup quarter final to look forward to, while we at Glasgow have the RaboDirect Pro12 play-off places in our sights.

I feel we must all go back to our clubs and look to set higher standards for ourselves, certainly before the squad meets up again before the summer tour Down Under.