Jamie Ritchie insists the fact Edinburgh are continuing to get themselves in position to score is a sign they are doing things right even if the bonus points aren’t coming.
Edinburgh have struggled to get four tries on the board in games this season with just two winning bonus points all season in the URC.
It was a similar story on Saturday when they scored three but couldn’t quite get the fourth in the 24-7 victory over Cardiff but Ritchie is confident that things will go right for them eventually and they will blow a team away.
They had their opportunities and came close near the end when Mark Bennett just couldn’t get on the end of a Ben Healy cross field pass before Duhan van der Merwe was also stopped on one of his trademark runs.
The win was the most important thing for them in a league that is tightly congested in the play-off spots with six points separating Stormers in fifth with the Lions in 11th as the final few weeks of the season approach.
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Ritchie said: “We’re aiming to win all our games in the run in and that’s another one ticked off. A massive result for us, we knew it would be tough and it was an emotional game for them but I’m proud of how we stuck in and got the W.
“We had a few opportunities where we coughed it up five metres out but you’d rather create and not take them than not create them at all. It’s just little tweaks and we should be converting.
“There’s a little bit of deliberation when we decided to go for points when we could have gone for the corner but I think with hindsight it probably freed us up to score the next try. We nearly got it at the end before the knock on. It was one of those ones where we didn’t quite get it but happy with the four points.”
Ritchie played an important role in the win and is a leader at the club and with the table so close, he is keeping an eye on how things are sitting.
He doesn’t believe it’s something to become obsessed about but he knows their play-off hopes are in their own hands for now.
They have a week off next week before hosting Zebre and the focus is just on taking it one game at a time for now and seeing where they end up at the end of the season.
He continued: “It’s one of those things you need to have an awareness of but it’s not necessarily something the whole group needs to worry about, just the guys driving the game forward and making the decisions in and around going to a corner or for points.
“It’s important to have an awareness and it adds a bit of extra motivation.
“All we can do is try and keep winning. Everything else is out of our control. We’ve just got to focus on ourselves and try and get bonus points and see where that gets us.
“It’s in our hands. Our next two games are at home and we back ourselves to put in a good performance so we’ll see what happens. It’s one week at a time at the moment so in three or four weeks time we’ll see where we’re at.
“All we can control is how we perform and the game we’re involved in so we’re going to try and keep winning and see if it gets us into the top eight.”
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