Blair Kinghorn insists shock Zebre loss was just a blip

Edinburgh's Blair Kinghorn kicks a conversion during his side's surprise home defeat against Zebre. Picture: SNS Group

After three weeks of soaring expectations as the team pulled together a series of impressive wins on the bounce under new interim head coach Duncan Hodge, the capital outfit were brought back down to Earth with a bump when they produced a performance which was as flat as any witnessed during the Alan Solomons era.

However, Kinghorn has insisted that this embarrassing defeat was a road bump for the team rather than a wrong turning.

“I think everyone was bitterly disappointed about the result from Friday night, but it is just the way rugby is sometimes. We have already put it to the back of our minds and you can see from the three weeks before that loss the good rugby we can play so we are focusing on that,” said the 19-year-old.

“Every team has a couple of bad results a year, the ball doesn’t bounce your way, the passes don’t go to hand, I think we just need to get back out there and show what we can do. We’ve got a good chance to bounce back against Ulster this coming Friday,” he added.

“The fans know what kind of rugby we can play, like we showed against Harlequins the week before when we had a great victory, and they can expect to see another big improvement this week – with heads up rugby and scoring more tries from counter attack space rather than running into contact.

“There is a lot of flair out there, we don’t just want to be pulled along by the forward pack and I think we have a lot of talent available to us.”

While Solomons was  never shy about telling his players exactly what he thought of their poorer performances, the new man in charge has clearly decided to take a more diplomatic approach. Hodge was clearly very disappointed with his team’s performance when he spoke to the media immediately after the match on Friday night, but Kinghorn said that there have been no wild recriminations at training this week.

“I think Duncan is a very chilled guy who keeps his nerve,” said Kinghorn.

“We all know what we did wrong out there so we are not focusing too much on the negatives from that display. We want to look at the positives and take them into the game on Friday.”