There was an obvious silver lining to Edinburgh’s Connacht-shaped cloud last Saturday. The defeat in Galway finally killed off the capital club’s last faint hopes of qualifying for the URC play-offs, but it also left them free to focus on the Champions Cup and tomorrow night’s last-16 visit to Leicester.
With their two remaining league games now dead rubbers, Edinburgh have this one last chance to keep their campaign alive. It is a chance which Stuart McInally says they have every intention of seizing.
“It’s our season now,” the Scotland hooker said of the one-off tie at Welford Road. “This is our season. We’re going down there, throw everything at them, and then we’ll see what we get.”
Edinburgh have undeniably underachieved in recent months; with the players at their disposal, they should be far higher up the league than 14th. And, while some of those players have been away on Scotland duty lately, head coach Mike Blair will have a full complement to choose from this time, including Pierre Schoeman, Jamie Ritchie, Hamish Watson and Duhan van der Merwe, all of whom were rested for the Connacht match.
“We’ve got a real boost this week with all the internationals coming back,” McInally continued. “The team we’ll be able to put out this week is going to be hugely experienced, and one that’s done really well in Europe in the past.
“We’ve got a good group of players, a good group of coaches here. We’ve been on the wrong side of a lot of results this year. A lot of the results that last year we’d won by four or five points, this year we’ve lost by four or five points. And it’s for us as a group of players and coaches to try and make sure those results start to turn in our favour.
“We looked at all the stats [from the Connacht game] on Monday, and the majority of the stats we saw, it’s a winning result by a good margin. But then we see the stats about turnovers conceded. They played very well in the first half and took all their chances; we didn’t take all of ours. And away from home, [conceding] 40 points, it wasn’t good enough.
“So we’ve got a lot of things to address in defence. But it’s so exciting going down to Leicester. We’re taking a step out of the league now and getting back into Europe, and we’re looking forward to taking on the English champions.”
