Mark Bennett insists Edinburgh will not take Zebre lightly - 'harsh to say they've not been great'

Zebre may have lost all 11 of their URC games so far this season, but Mark Bennett insists that no-one in the Edinburgh squad will be taking the Italian side lightly when they visit the DAM Health Stadium on Saturday.

Mark Bennett during an Edinburgh Rugby training session at the DAM Health Stadium ahead of facing Zebre on Saturday. (Photo by Ross Parker / SNS Group)

Bennett and his team-mates are on a bad run of results themselves, having lost their last four league outings and slipped down to tenth in the 16-team table. And, while his own team have been below their best recently, the 29-year-old centre pointed out that Zebre have proven themselves capable of raising their game on occasion.

“I think it’s harsh when people say they’ve not been great,” Bennett said. “Watch the way they’re playing. They play great rugby, and at the start of the season they ran good teams close, so they’re going to be a good challenge. Zebre won’t be any pushovers, that’s for sure.”

Zebre did indeed begin the season in encouraging fashion, picking up two bonus points in each of their first two games, the home defeats by Leinster and the Sharks. Since then, however, they have been pointless, which suggests that Edinburgh - who beat them 38-19 in Italy in October - should only need a consistent 80-minute effort to get the better of them again.

Admittedly, consistency throughout a match has been conspicuous by its absence from some performances by Bennett’s side, the most recent being their home loss to Glasgow last week. But, with the exception of a heavy home defeat by Munster at the start of last month, they have at least earned bonus points for narrow defeats in their recent outings - a fact from which Bennett believes his team-mates should derive some encouragement.

“We need to dust ourselves down,” he admitted. “At the weekend there it wasn’t good enough in the second half.

“We’ve made individual errors at key moments that have cost us. But we’re not far away, which is the most frustrating thing. If you look at the games that we’ve lost, they’ve been within seven points, so they are games we could have won.

“We need a result. It’s as simple as that - it doesn’t matter who it was next.”