Red card concern for Drua coach

Swire Shipping Fijian Drua head coach Mick Byrne is not going to have a repeat of having 14-men on the field following the issuing of a red card.

Fijian hooker and skipper Tevita Ikanivere was handed a yellow card on the stroke of halftime for a dangerous clean-out. Ikanivere’s yellow card was upgraded to red during the break, reducing Drua to 14 men for the first 18 minutes of the second half.

“We still gave away that second half; we’ll continue to work on it. We’ll get better. It just keeps coming. I mean, we’ve been in this situation a couple of times this year,” Byrne said.

Byrne was disappointed with the Drua discipline despite the 31-13 win over the Western Force at Churchill Park in Lautoka on Saturday.

More wins at home

“More wins at home; a good one, for us this week is to travel away after a win,” he said.

“It’s a short week, which is a good thing. We’ll get our prep done.”

The players spent yesterday with their families attending the Easter Sunday church service.

“A solid training session on Wednesday and we fly out Thursday,” he said.

“We’ll come in, it’s great to be able to get off the couple of wins at home and not have to travel back. We’ll come in on Monday (today), a great opportunity for players to get straight back into it.

“Probably the main message is, to make sure that we keep coming off the line in defense and put pressure on the defense.

“They say defence is an attitude, that’s an area that if you get your defensive attitude right, the rest of the game goes on.

“Our boys did that. They defended well. They got off the line and they were rewarded. A great defensive scrum set just

sort of epitomised the second half. So, I was pleased that we focused on our defense halftime to come off the line and put pressure on them and I thought we did that.

Missed tackles

Western Force head coach Simon Cron said, their loss was not the result they wanted, under heavy conditions.

“We knew that might happen it had been raining for three weeks. 26 missed tackles are too many; we must look at how,” Cron said.

“For us, if you miss 26 you are going to fix it. We had a plan around that we just didn’t execute that plan well.

“So, you know, we had enough opportunities in that game to put a lot of pressure on them and probably alleviate the pressure with either errors or penalties.”