ALEX Rae feels his Coventry Rugby side should have put basement club Cambridge ‘to the sword’ after battling to a hard-fought victory on their return to action.
Coventry claimed a 43-33 bonus point victory at Butts Park Arena following a five-week break.
However, with Cov 17 points ahead at the interval, Rae felt his side should have killed the game off in the second period.
Rae said: “We looked like a team that hasn’t played for five weeks and it almost had the feel of a pre-season game as a result.
“So there’s plenty to work on but you can’t really grumble too much about getting five points at home.
“I was pleased with some aspects of our attack especially in the first half. When we got it right our set-plays were excellent and I also thought our maul and scrum went well.
“But I said to the lads at half-time that we needed to kill Cambridge off and not keep them interested in the game and we then did the opposite by starting the second half really poorly and that fuelled them.
“Our foot should have been on their throat, they should never have got a look-in and when we watch it back we’ll be kicking ourselves as we had a chance to really put a team to the sword and we missed it.
“Cambridge emptied the tanks and hung in there to make it hard for us and they deserve credit for that but that last 40 minutes was not what I was expecting after a decent first half.”
Skipper Jordon Poole crossed twice early on before debutant Jake Henry, Oli Morris, Josh Barton, Ryan Hutler and Suva Ma’asi all dotted down in a seven-try success.
And Rae singled out on-loan Edinburgh winger Henry for praise after the 24-year-old recovered from a serious hamstring injury to make his belated debut for the club.
Rae added: “I was really pleased for Jake.
“He’s someone that never moans or is down in the dumps, he smiles a lot and that’s infectious.
“It was great to see him score, to be honest we didn’t really want to leave him on the pitch for the full 80 minutes and he ended up with quite a lot of cramp but that was how things worked out.
“When you have a long-term injury you can have some dark moments but he’s tried hard to stay positive and I’m really happy for him.”
Coventry are next in action against Chinnor on Saturday, March 29 with kick-off at 3pm at Kingsey Road.
