Richard Cockerill taps into history in bid to lift Edinburgh

Edinburgh head coach Richard Cockerill is taking a realistic view of Saturday's testing clash with Scarlets. Picture: SNS

A move has been made to solve the former, with the hope that some of the latter can grow from it, with the move to Myreside, although that remains very much a work in progress.

New head coach Richard Cockerill has spoken of his desire to build off the field as much as on it as he becomes the latest man charged with trying to replicate the success of Glasgow Warriors in a city which, in theory, should be more fertile ground for a thriving professional rugby club.

A word often used when assessing the story of Edinburgh over the best part of a decade is “malaise” and, after a heartening if not mind-blowing start to the Cockerill reign, the old failings were very much on show last Friday in the desperately disappointing 20-17 home defeat by Benetton Treviso.

Cockerill remains confident that he can tap into the rugby potential of the Scottish capital and spark some life into a dormant entity but is under no illusions about the task in hand.

“Firstly we’ve got a good group of players who care about what they do. We’re working hard on creating an environment but it’s going to take longer than three or four months,” said the head coach yesterday.

“There’s a lot of history to this club we need to dig into and dig out. It’s got a lot of history of exceptionally good players who’ve played for Scotland and the Lions and we need to revisit that history. But we’ve got to keep working hard.”

Cockerill reacted to Friday’s defeat with, publicly at least, a fairly restrained fury and is taking a level-headed approach as Edinburgh face a testing trip to the champions Scarlets on Saturday.

“We weren’t the best team in the competition when we beat Cardiff, and we’re not the worst team now we’ve lost to Treviso,” he said. “We fell flat on our faces on Friday. I don’t want to blame the referee or anyone else, it’s purely our responsibility that it happened and we have to be better than that. If we’re realistic and honest with each other then that’s the starting point of improvement.”

Perversely, such a daunting trip could be just the medicine needed to focus minds, though the coach laughed when asked if concerted effort and the avoidance of any complacency could at least be relied upon this weekend.

“I’m never expecting anything ever again,” he said. “We’ll train as well as we can this week, we’ll put a good side out and I expect us to stay in the battle and try and win. How realistic that is we’ll see. This team has a reputation of really poor performances and then beating the good sides so I hope that continues.”

Scarlets will be a wounded animal after losing their first match in the competition for ten games at the weekend when they lost to Ulster and Cockerill accepts that a trip to Llanelli will be a much tougher examination than they faced in the Welsh capital on the opening night.

“Scarlets have a better team and better squad [to Cardiff],” he said. “They are very strong across the board with internationals and British Lions. They play a very good brand of rugby that’s difficult to play against.

“You let them get on the front foot and play with ball in hand over the gain line then it’s very difficult. We have to defend better than we did on Friday, we’ve got to front up like we did against Cardiff and we’ve got to go another step. If we don’t it’ll be an uncomfortable  afternoon.

“I’d have liked to have been three from three going to Scarlets and given it full noise and gone there with some confidence. But the weekend we let ourselves down and we’ve got to go to two very difficult away games and we’ve got to have a reaction, front up and make sure we perform.

“There’s no magic recipe to making us good – it’s about training well every week, training well in the gym, looking after your lifestyle, getting out on the field and working hard together.”