Walker says Ospreys are 'heading in the right

Nikki Walker has said that the Ospreys are 'heading in the right direction' after Sunday's bonus point victory over Edinburgh, but has told his colleagues that the team need to put in an 80-minute performance after racing into a big half-time lead.

Although the Ospreys picked up the five point maximum haul from the 31-10 win, thanks to tries from Tommy Bowe, Lee Byrne, Ryan Jones and Jonathan Thomas, the Scottish winger, who had a try of his own disallowed for a forward pass in the build up, says that there needs to be continuous improvement from the Ospreys over the coming weeks.

He said:

“We’ve put a lot of hard work in, but obviously our form hasn’t been where we wanted it to be. We’ve been working on a lot of new things and today you’ve seen some good stuff from the Ospreys but we’re not quite the finished article yet.

“There were a lot of opportunities went amiss today, but we did take a lot of chances as well. We aren’t the finished article, but we are heading in the right direction. We’re a lot happier today than we were a few weeks ago.

“I think we took a lot of confidence from the away win in Glasgow last week, and the focus in training has been on progressing every week, just getting better and better. Hopefully, next week we can step up again, we’re going to need to, as Leicester is a hard place to go.

“Last week against Glasgow we ‘nilled’ them in the second half and scored 20 points. We had a similar performance in the first half today, but we weren’t happy with the second half. What we are working towards is that hopefully over the next couple of weeks, particularly next week against Leicester, we can pull it all together and put in an 80-minute performance.”