Nick Evans full of praise for Marcus Smith
Harlequins attack and backs coach Nick Evans was just as pleased with the way Marcus Smith set up the winning try in his side’s 25-21 victory at London Irish as the way he finished it.
Fly-half Smith produced a sublime inside step that led to him scoring off the final play at the Brentford Community Stadium, having just come up with an excellent kick to touch that put Quins deep in Exiles territory.
It also meant the 22-year-old took some of the spotlight off Quins veterans Mike Brown and Danny Care, who made their 350th and 300th appearances for the club, respectively.
Pretty good at beating people
Evans said: “I’m probably most proud of the kick because with Marcus, if you put six [men] in front of him, with that amount of space, he’s pretty good at beating people most of the time.
“But in that type of mental pressure of getting a set-piece penalty around halfway and you have to put it in the corner to give us a chance – and the wind was pretty swirly out there.
“For him to really back himself and go for it in a big moment like that is great learnings from him and great maturity, so I’m pretty proud of him for that.
“We had opportunities and we weren’t as accurate as we wanted to be, but we knew we’d have a chance through our set-piece.
“It was a weird old game – it was pretty loose at times, pretty inaccurate, but it was nice to come away with the result.”
Harlequins led 15-9 at half-time as tries by Brown and Cadan Murley were replied by three penalties from Paddy Jackson.
The hosts made the most of a red card to Andre Esterhuizen to go ahead through tries from Ben Loader and Ollie Hassell-Collins, only for Smith to conjure up his moment of magic at the end.
London Irish director of rugby Declan Kidney said: “We did okay for the first 20 [minutes] of the second half, but we’ll be looking at the first half as much as the last 10 minutes.
“That’s because we probably didn’t play as well as we can do, we probably needed to go after the game a little bit more.
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“There’s plenty of learnings for us, there always is, but credit to Harlequins, they stuck in there and took their chances at the end.
“We got one try on a transition, when they had that intercept and we played on and we transitioned well, but there were a couple of things we probably could have made a bit easier for ourselves.
“We did okay, I think there were just one or two other opportunities that we probably didn’t quite exploit and Harlequins did what they’re good at, at the end.”