Discipline under pressure key for Flying Fijians

Fiji Airways Flying Fijians Head Coach John McKee will be urging his chargers to be wiser with possession and more consistent with discipline as they prepare for their second test against Uruguay this Saturday (Sunday FJT) in Hartpury, England.

The pragmatic Head Coach has taken stock from the disappointing second half against Scotland at Murrayfield last weekend and is looking ahead to the remaining two games of tour.

“We went into the game on Saturday with high hopes that we could be successful against that Scottish team, and that certainly wasn’t to be” he said.

“At half time we were right in the game, then the two yellow cards, at that critical point when he had a narrow lead, saw Scotland score either side of the break which hurt us.”

“But that game is behind us now,  we have some strong reference points on things to work on and there were some positive aspects out of that game that we will keep reinforcing.”

Those positive aspects for Fiji included tries from back row enforcer Viliame Mata and flying winger Semi Radradra, both coming off typical Fijian open style rugby, which McKee says the team will look to exploit further in the upcoming tests.

“We had some very good patches of play from unstructured play which paid off for us, and we’ll be looking to build on that.”

“We have the type of talented players who play the unstructured game well, but what we need to do is work very hard on retaining possession for a number of phases, when the defence system is strong in front of us.”

“That’s where we fell down on the weekend, there were times we turned the ball over quite early in the possession phases so we didn’t get to build enough pressure.”

“We expect Uruguay to kick the ball back to us a lot, so we will look at our counter attack structures, and work harder to get into our attacking shape off those counter attacking opportunities.”

Fiji were tasked with weathering the Scottish attack for 80% of Saturday’s match, something McKee was prepared for, but again the disciplinary issues including successive yellow cards for the Flying Fijians placing excessive strain on the team’s defence.

“We certainly had to defend a lot of driving maul and overall did quite well there. Although we gave away some silly penalties that enabled them to keep us under pressure, which we need to take out of our game.”

“With the yellow cards, the first one collapsing the mall it was disappointing that we didn’t get a warning first, but it was definitely an infringement.”

“The second one, we’ll be seeking further clarification from the match officials hierarchy in terms of that because we felt we were defending that maul well and it was moving quickly across field, and the defensive effort caused the maul move sideways and the Scottish players couldn’t stay on their feet.”

In the second half of Saturday’s match Scotland seemed to grow in strength and accelerate as the game went on, perhaps benefitting from the extra fortnight of lead in to the test.

“Scotland took a bit of a gamble and played a very up tempo game, thinking that we wouldn’t be able to go with the pace of the game, and that paid off for them.”

“We may be on a bit of an uneven playing field preparing for this November Tour with such a short preparation, Scotland had their squad together for longer and had played a game the week before which obviously helped them.”

“But right at this moment we’re very focussed on this next two games and building our combinations and our performance in those games.”