Dai Young has delivered a starkly honest assessment of what he has labelled by far the worst performance from his team since he has been back in charge at Cardiff.
Young watched on as his team leaked seven tries in going down to a 48-12 hammering at the hands of Ulster in a United Rugby Championship clash at Belfast’s Kingspan Stadium on Friday night.
He didn’t pull any punches after the match, describing the basic skills as “awful”, the tackling as just not good enough and admitting the Arms Park outfit had let themselves down.
The former Wales and Lions prop says everyone in the set up - both players and coaches - need to look at themselves as they prepare to head out to South Africa for back-to-back URC matches.
Reflecting on the heavy defeat to Ulster, he said: “It’s far by the worst performance since I’ve been here.
“I didn’t see it coming, to be quite honest.
“I knew it would be tough because we haven’t played for five weeks.
“But that’s certainly not an excuse for some of the skills we demonstrated.
“You can’t hide from the fact it was a real poor performance.
“The more disappointing aspect was our execution of basic skills. Our catch and pass skills were awful.
“We pride ourselves on our one-up tackles which just weren’t good enough.
“And we turned over the ball 10 times in the first 25 minutes, six of those off first phase.
“You are never going to put teams under pressure like that. Ulster hardly had to make a tackle for 30 minutes. We didn’t stress them out at all.
“We couldn’t really build anything due to our poor basic skills.
“We made all the basics look really difficult and we made the real easy things look really hard, which is really disappointing.”
He continued: “We just lacked any sort of spring in our step. We looked really flat right across the board.
“We just weren’t on the edge like we have been previously.
“We were out of shape, out of structure, stepping away from policies.
“We were put under pressure and our game cracked.
“I said beforehand that if we play like we can play it’s going to take a good team to beat us.
“Ulster are a good team, but they didn’t have to be that good, to be honest, because I don’t think we pushed them at all.
“We didn’t make them work as much as we would like and we let ourselves down.”
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Young says the key now is how Cardiff respond to what happened out in Belfast.
“I have said to the players, team spirit and togetherness is easy when you are winning,” the director of rugby said.
“It’s a little bit harder when you have a poor performance and a poor result.
“It will test us and we will have to come out stronger.
“We’ve just got to bounce back next week.
“The players are hugely disappointed. They were all looking at the floor in the dressing room, but there’s nobody down there to help them.
“What we’ve got to look at is ourselves. The coaching team has got to look at what we’ve done, how do we get better, because obviously the messages we have been saying this week haven’t sunk in and they certainly didn’t deliver what we talked about.
“Some of the options we were doing, we hadn’t practised them.
“The players have got to look at each other as well. How do they support each other, how do the forwards help the backs and vice versa, individually how do I help my mate next to me?
“Now is not the time to point fingers, now is the time to get closer and work harder because that’s the only way we are going to move forward.”
One positive for Cardiff was that Wales and Lions flanker Josh Navidi played the full 80 minutes on his first appearance after five months out with a dislocated shoulder.
“We didn’t intend to leave him on all game, but the messages we were getting was that he was feeling fine,” Young added.
“He felt totally comfortable with game intensity and fitness levels, so we decided to leave him on.
“He didn’t have a chance to get into the game as much as he would like because we were on the back foot all the time.
“But it was certainly nice to see him coming through a game.”
Young revealed that fly-half Jarrod Evans failed a HIA, having also seemingly picked up a knock to his left wrist from the way he was holding it as he came off.
“That’s a position we are struggling with, with Rhys Priestland being injured as well,” he said.
“Fingers crossed Jarrod is okay for South Africa.”
Cardiff head out to the Rainbow Nation on Tuesday for rearranged URC fixtures against the Lions and the Stormers.
Those games were postponed in late November and early December after South Africa was placed on the UK Government's red travel list due to the outbreak of the Omicron variant of Covid.
The Welsh region found themselves stranded in Cape Town, amid travel issues and positive Covid cases, and ended up going through an extended period of hotel isolation first there and then back in England.
It was a troubled trip which took its toll on the group, so how are they now feeling about heading back out to South Africa?
“I think globally the world is in a much better place than it was at the time,” Young said.
“So hopefully things won’t happen that will cause us any problems again.
“I would be a liar to say we are not a little bit concerned about it because we lived through it the last time.
“We would be lying if we said it’s not in the back of our minds.
“But we need to do it, we need to go and exorcise the ghosts.
“It’s our job and we have to get on with it, really.
“So we will be going with a smile on our face and with two fingers crossed behind our backs.
“We are going there to do a job. We need to concentrate on the rugby because if we don’t we will get a good stuffing out there because they are quality teams.”
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