Nathan Hines: ‘We were staring down the barrel of a disaster’

There wasn’t an upset in Invercargill yesterday, but I can tell you one thing: if we play like this again then there’s going to be one on Wednesday when we play Georgia in the same stadium as that nerve-racking match with Romania. There’s nothing surer in my mind. If we play the same way again, with the same immaturity and lack of accuracy, then Georgia will beat us and so will every other team in this pool. We’ll be going home early. We got out of jail and we’d better learn the lessons – and quickly.

I was talking to Ovidiu Tonita, my former team-mate at Perpignan, afterwards. Tonita was saying that the Georgian pack is bigger and better than his own pack at Romania and given what the Romanian forwards did in the scrum and in their driving mauls yesterday then you get an idea of what kind of challenge awaits us this week. Fair play, we dug out the win and we shouldn’t downplay the guts and the skill we did in doing that. With the clock ticking we were staring down the barrel of a disaster, but we pulled ourselves out of it, got the win, got the four-try bonus point and the relief that comes with knowing we are alive to fight another day.

But, let’s face it, Georgia are going to look at what happened here and they’re going to think that they can do a job on us up front. I wasn’t shocked, but I was really disappointed. There was no sense beforehand that we would lose our way like this, no hint in the opening minutes of the painful struggle to come. We scored two early tries and could have had two more when Simon Danielli, right, went through but didn’t score and when we were called for what the referee thought was a blocking play.

Rugby is a game of pressure, though. And Romania piled the pressure on us. Of course, we let them do it. You win the ball, you get some territory and you play in the right areas. That’s what you’re supposed to do, but we didn’t do that for a big chunk in the middle of the game. We had a great start and a great finish, but the stuff in between almost saw us beaten. It was like the Italy game last month. We took our foot off the gas. We had some chances that we didn’t take in the first half and then we got brought into a dogfight.

In the second-half, when we needed to put pressure on them we didn’t put our kick-offs in the field of play. I thought that once we got a kick-off in the field we had a fighting chance of scoring. I was catching on that side of the pitch in the warm-up and Ruaridh Jackson was kicking and the kicks were drifting out nearly every time. It wasn’t easy. I’m not a kicker, but we could have done with sticking it down the middle so we could get some field position.

There was immaturity out there. It was just so flat. After the start we had we thought everything was going to follow on, but we’re not a team that can have that attitude. Things don’t come easily to us. We need to play hard for 80 minutes. We can’t go into a lull and then expect to ease to victory.

Is complacency the right word? I don’t know. Sometimes you can get these errors because the boys are too keen. You’re wanting to make an offload or a pass, you’re wanting to get out wide and support the backs when the best thing is just to stay tight. It can be that you want to play too much. Maybe that was one of our problems.

For the first 20 minutes everything was going well and everybody thought it was going to stay that way. We weren’t decisive enough in dealing with their maul, we were too high at the breakdown, we lacked concentration in the scrum. All of those things are fixable and we’ll be working hard to get it right in time for Wednesday. I’m just mightily relieved that we haven’t been punished for our errors. On the face of it, we have five points. In reality, we have a heap of work to do.