Leinster boss Stuart Lancaster says he came down hard on his players after their two-point defeat to Scarlets on Saturday.
At two games in a one-point win and a two-point defeat may be enough to keep some coaches happy, but not the former England boss.
Leinster scraped a win in Cardiff two weeks ago and made 11 changes for the trip to Scarlets. Leading 14-10 at half-time, they looked well placed to push on, but failed to close the game out, and registered their first defeat of the season.
Sure, there was no James Ryan, Seán O’Brien, Dan Leavy, Johnny Sexton, Garry Ringrose, or Rob Kearney — but Lancaster still expects his men to win.
“I go hard on them because I think it’s about winning,” he said.
“Having gone through the pain of losing, and not just the two semi-finals at Leinster, but being an international coach, you still learn that the pain of losing is not worth it. Our mindset should be to go out and try and win every game.”
Lancaster said there may have been some “cohesion” issues in attack after Leo Cullen made 11 changes to the side that won in Cardiff the week before, but he still had the likes of Tadhg Furlong, Cian Healy, Devin Toner, Jack Conan, Robbie Henshaw, James Lowe, and Jordan Larmour to call on.
Sexton & Co. are likely to make a return to action in the coming weeks as Europe approaches, but Lancaster says all mem- bers of the squad must be prepared for victory in every game.
The reality is we’ve got players who are coming back in from international duty, we’ve got Europe coming around the corner and trophies are won at the end of the season,” he said, “but you need to be in a position to win the trophies, so in a conference system you need to either win your conference or come second.
“And what counts really is not just winning all your games, but particularly against the teams that are in your conference.
“So Scarlets, away from home, if we could have won that game with them being in our conference would have been a big win.
“But as it happens we didn’t so it means now that the priority goes to the next block because we’ve got Dragons at home, Edinburgh at home, who are both improved teams, we have Connacht away who beat us more that fair and square and then it’s Munster at home. So we’ve four games now in the lead up to Europe where we need to win.”
Jack McGrath will be missing “for a few weeks” after injuring his knee in training last week, but there are no other significant injury concerns for Leinster as they approach a key block of games.
“It is a shame for Jack because he obviously worked really hard to get into the Ireland team at the end of the tour and he’s worked hard on his fitness, so it’s only a couple of weeks, but it has been frustrating for him really,” Lancaster said.