Richard Cockerill takes responsibility for Edinburgh defeat

Edinburgh coach Richard Cockerill was 'very disappointed' with Friday's performance. Picture: SNS

Edinburgh coach Richard Cockerill accepted responsibility for his side's depressing home collapse to Benetton Treviso last Friday night, which took the wind out of what had been an encouraging start to the Guinness Pro14 season.

The new boss chose to appear himself at yesterday’s BT Murrayfield press conference rather than delegate to one of his assistants and was forthright in his appraisal of the 20-17 defeat at Myreside.

“When the team don’t play well that’s my responsibility,” said the 46-year-old Englishman.

“It was very disappointing. It was a poor performance. We showed a lot of the traits that have done us over the past few years so it was very disappointing. Very much points lost.”

Cockerill said there had been a “robust” meeting with the playing squad as they now enter a daunting couple of weeks on the road, facing champions Scarlets in Llanelli on Saturday before heading to Dublin to play the four-time winners Leinster.

“We talked about the inaccuracy in looking after the ball,” said Cockerill. “We were a bit unlucky. Jason Harries thought he scored but the ref thought he knocked it on. That’s life. You can’t defend that poorly and softly and let easy points in. We were too easy to play against. It was not good enough by a long way.”

Cockerill said that, alongside bringing the obvious improvement that he has been primarily tasked with, his job also includes “managing expectations” around a club that have been in a rut for too many years. “At this point we’re still a bottom-four team and we have to work our way out of it,” he said. “We’ve had two good performances in pre-season, one good performance against Cardiff when we were on it, a so-so performance against Newport [Dragons] when we managed to get ourselves out of it, and we got royally bitten on the backside at the weekend.

“That level of performance isn’t acceptable. And if guys want to play like that, then they won’t. They can’t stay in the team.

“Unfortunately, I don’t have a complete set of players to change everybody, so some guys will get another opportunity against Scarlets.”

If one positive could be taken from Friday’s let-down, it was that Cockerill was able to gain more insight into his players’ mentality. “I learned some valuable lessons on how I have to deal with this group,” said the coach. “At the moment, they need to be driven hard every day because, if they’re not, they switch off and that’s just the nature of the beast.

“Not everybody switches off and not everybody’s sloppy, but we’ve got to make sure the weaker minded of the group play and work as hard as the others and we’ll keep chipping away at that. It doesn’t happen overnight.”