Dai Young believes Cardiff Blues’ bonus-point win over Edinburgh Rugby was the perfect preparation for their European knockout against London Irish.
Cardiff went into the Guinness PRO14 encounter knowing they had to beat the Scots, and secure a four match-point advantage, to finish fourth or even third had the Scarlets lost.
And while the Llanelli-based club fought back to win against second-placed Connacht, the Blues kept up their side of the bargain as they took a maximum points haul thanks to a scintillating second-half performance.
Young will now have to wait to see if fourth will be enough to qualify for the European Champions Cup, with criteria yet to be confirmed, but he believes it was an ideal warm-up for the Good Friday showdown with London Irish in the Challenge Cup.
He said: “We talked all week about playing cup rugby. If we want to be the team we all want to be then we will have many knockout games and be in the business end of the season when winner takes all.
“Edinburgh was a good example of that, we played a lot of sensible rugby in the second half and came away with the win.
“We couldn’t have done any more and hopefully it is enough but if it’s not then as the boys have said in the changing rooms we will look at some of the performances when we could have won earlier in the season but let it slip.
“Hopefully it’s enough to sneak in and if it’s not we have to come back harder next season and make sure we are there.
“London Irish is a one off game once again. I’d like to see us play 80 minutes like have played two 40 minutes (against Edinburgh and Benetton). It’s never going to be perfect, you are always going to lose momentum and things will go against you but against Edinburgh we showed real belief.
“When things went against us, we didn’t panic, we kept to the process, we kept to the structure and game plan and came away with a really good performance in the second-half and a really good win.”
It was far from plain sailing for Young’s side, who slipped to a 10-3 half-time deficit, following an error strewn 40 minutes, in which Edinburgh played with an unrivalled ferocity.
Fortunately, Young’s half-time message did the trick and it was Cardiff that flew back out of the blocks and racked up four tries courtesy of Liam Belcher, Rey Lee-Lo, Jarrod Evans and James Ratti.
He continued: “It was a real mixed bag in the first half, pretty similar to the Treviso game really. We didn’t play the game in the right areas, our kicking game was short, we made a lot of 50-50 kicks that ended up with us defending for b ig periods and losing the territory battle. We only had something like 30% territory and you’re always going to be under pressure.
“We talked at half-time and said if we are going to play for field position we need to kick longer and when we have the ball in their half we need to keep hold of it and respect it.
“We made too many skill errors in the first half - bad passes, little knock ons and we turned that completely round in the second half.
“Everything we talked about at half-time, in fairness to the players they went out and delivered.
“The spirit and determination to work hard and get better is there in abundance. We have a long way to go, lots of things to improve on but they are a very honest group and they realise that and there’s bags of improvement across the board.
“We are working off a good base, in terms of the boys want to work hard, they want to get better and they are more than happy to put the work in to get better.”