Connacht Team Talk Thread VI - Some like it TOH

Jack Aungier will still be celebrating his school's win in the Leinster Schools Senior Cup quarter finals

At worst we'll be 12th after the weekend.

Backs to the wall, Injuries and international duties allowing this look like a first choice pack with a first choice half back pairing.

Connacht by 14 bonus point win hopefully.

Looking decent in attack, hampered by several unforced drops by tight 5 forwards. Think Cardiff also look dangerous and will probably pick up a couple of scores of their own.

If you had a euro for every handling error/knock on today…

Love to see that from Gavin.

Great counter ruck.

Covered across well from 13 earlier.

This is going exactly how I feared it might at half time bar we snuck a try.

Even by Connacht standards this is some collapse.

Thought they might rue passing up the 3 points. Well worked try but this game should never have gotten to this

Nice one Connacht.

24-19 ——— 4 tries bonus point win.

Credit to Muldoon, our lineout is excellent and two well worked maul tries today.

Was happy with the first half performance despite us leaving a lot of points out there. They should have scored at least ten more than they did.

I don't know what happened in the second half.

I rarely drink these days but if you gave me a bottle of whiskey at the start of the second half it would have been all gone after 30 minutes.

Ioane's kicking was poor but he did well in general play.

Ben Murphy looked great, Hurly-Langton was the best of the back row, they all played well in the first half. Forde and Gavin did okay individually but they need more games together to get in sync I think.

I felt we needed to spend more time in the middle of the field before spreading the ball out wide, Cardiff were always ready for us because we didn't pull them in from the wings.

We got the points though and we have a realistic chance to make the top 8. That's the most important thing.

The wind was brutal for sure but that penalty after about 30 minutes should have been scored. I'm not just talking about goal kicking though. And it wasn't just him, there was a few kicks that made no sense and in my opinion cost us points as we were winning at the point of contact with crash ball and good rucks. Cardiff were being caught a lot for infringements and our lineout and scrum were both working very well.

With the wind I was sure we'd keep it with the forwards unless it really opened up on outside. We weren't patient enough to suck more defenders in from the outside.

The fact we dug it out was important for our league campaign but we are still behind the 8 ball and the fact that we dug yet another hole for ourselves is worrying.

The one positive for us is that outside the Top 5 no one is very convincing but ultimately we've left a lot of points behind us already. Even with the Lions and Stormers not in good form winning one or both of those games in south africa is a huge ask and we have next to no wiggle room with the amounts of teams in mid table.

With the challenge cup games on home turf we can't be messing around with the team for those games so reaching top 8 is still a very long shot.