Ospreys skipper Justin Tipuric cut a despondent figure when he spoke to the press after Friday night's Heineken Cup loss to Saracens, but he was quick to say that players will roll their sleeves up and get stuck back into it.
With the pain of defeat not yet sunk in fully, the young openside had to face questions from the media, saying:
“We’re all down about the result. We’re a bunch of boys who fight, we try and give everything out there, but in the end, Saracens were the better team.
“It was stop-start, that type of game, but some times you have them and you have to react. We didn’t react in the best way really. It’s down to that one or two errors and not being clinical enough. We’ve created chances and when we’re reviewing games we can see that, we’re just not finishing them. It comes down to human errors really and that’s something we’ve got to work on.
“We did try and play rugby out there, but there were just too many errors. That last pass, that dropped ball, and it was crucial in the end. It came down to a charge down in the end, that was the difference between the two teams. It put us on the back foot for a while, we recharged the batteries at half-time and we knew we had to come out and do a job. In the end, Saracens are a good team, they are English champions, and they were able to come out on top.
“We were so close on a number of occasions in the second half, but it just came down to luck or whatever you want to call it. It just didn’t happen. They are a good team. Obviously we’re disappointed now, but we’ve got a good bunch of boys in the team and it’s time for us to bounce back these next couple of games over Christmas.
“It’s not over yet, we’ve still got two more games and we’ve got to go out there and perform.”
Just as Head Coach Sean Holley found him self asked about the scrum lottery that had been such a big factor of the game, so did Tipuric. Asked was the referee explaining his decisions on the field, he said:
“There were quite a few problems out there so it was hard to pinpoint one thing. A number of decisions were for early engagement as you could see, there were a lot of free-kicks, one not binding. I can’t think of them all, there were so many ones.
“I’d better watch what I say because I know my front row won’t be too happy if I say we’d be better off to not have scrums, but it’s a bit of a lottery there at the moment. You can’t really take it out of the game, but we need to do something.”