Edinburgh captain Jamie Ritchie says he saw positive signs in his team’s 16-6 loss to Leicester on Friday – even though defeat in the Champions Cup last-16 tie effect-ively brought the capital club’s season to an early end.
The Tigers were worthy winners at Welford Road, with Edinburgh’s only scores being two Emiliano Boffelli penalties.
But, while clearly disappointed by the result, Ritchie – whose team’s loss to Connacht last weekend killed off their hopes of a URC play-off spot – believes there was a distinct if modest improvement in his team’s performance.
“I can’t fault the effort of the lads,” he said. “We spoke about fronting up and being a lot more physical than we had been in the past few weeks, and I certainly feel we did that.
“For us there were a lot of good things to take out of that game. We put a lot of pressure on their line-out, we defended a lot better than we had been doing, so I’m frustrated with the errors, but there’s stuff to build on for the last couple of games of the year.”
Of course, when you have quality internationals throughout your team, you should be doing a lot more than merely showing glimmers of hope in defeat.
As Ritchie conceded, Edinburgh have simply failed to play well enough for long enough in games, hence their tendency to end up on the wrong side of close results.
“There have been moments when we have lacked that clinical edge to put away opportunities. I think we’ve had no issue in creating them,” he added. “I think it’s just been stringing together that 80-minute performance. That’s probably something that we’ll be looking to improve on, getting those consistent performances together.”
Edinburgh now have an unwanted weekend off as the European quarter-finals take place. Their next match is a league fixture at home to Ospreys a week on Saturday.
