United Rugby Championship: Inconsistency is hampering Connacht says Jamie Heaslip
Connacht's Conor Oliver appears dejected at the final whistle after the Heineken Champions Cup, Pool A match at The Sportsground in Galway, Ireland. Picture date: Saturday January 15, 2022.
Jamie Heaslip says that the lack of consistency in the Connacht camp is costing the side after they were put to the sword by Leinster in a 45-8 defeat this weekend.
Leinster ran in seven tries en route to the handsome scoreline and will face Connacht in a Champions Cup double-header in April.
Work to do
The loss means Connacht sit in 10th place in the United Rugby Championship with a tour of South Africa and Italy to come with Leinster sitting on top of the pile.
“It’s not going to be easy,” Heaslip told RTÉ Sport.
“If they were to stop now and look back they would look at themselves and say ‘we are not being consistent at all. We are not being consistent for 80 minutes in a game, we are not being consistent week on week. We can go from a high to an unbelievable low.’
“To get to the end of a long season, when you are playing in two competitions and you throw in a couple of internationals taking away your top players, it’s 11 months long, you’ve got to deliver consistency.
“You don’t have to be at 90-100% all the time but to get to the knockouts you’ve got to be 75-80% consistently.”
Jerry Flannery believes there is room for improvement before the sides meet on April 8 in Galway.
“It’s going to be really hard but there’s a couple of things they can write off. They did have a red card, they can be sharper on things like that and keep 15 players on the field,” he said.
“In the first 20 minutes they made a load of errors, missing touch, passing the ball into touch. They stopped that and they were right in the mix.
“The second half then, whether it was fatigue, we saw those errors creeping in again and it certainly won’t be good enough against Leinster.”
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