The Waratahs won’t have time to dwell on their loss to the Crusaders, but coach Daryl Gibson admits they have to stop making things hard for themselves.
With just five days until their clash against the defending champion Hurricanes in Wellington, Gibson said they couldn’t spend too long thinking about Sunday’s 41-22 defeat.
“We can’t afford to be stuck in that game,” he said.
“Tomorrow we’ve got to start moving on, move towards the Hurricanes.
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“We’ll go through the tape. There’ll be some positive play but I guess the key thing for us was our execution around our plan.
“Sometimes we gave the Crusaders a lot of free ball from kicks and that certainly wasn’t part of our plan.”
Another slow start hurt the Waratahs, looking down a 12-point hole early in the piece and Gibson said they needed to turn that around, on top of 47 missed tackles.
“You look at the points that we conceded, we were 12 points down very quickly within 10 minutes,” he added.
“Big passages of play where they held their composure better and managed to come away with some points in those moments.
“We are giving teams a good start. The positive in that is we fight back, there’s some good character in there and get ourselves back in the fight.
“That’s the difficult thing. Tonight we did the hard work and we let that slip.”
Waratahs captain Michael Hooper was already looking to Friday’s Wellington matchup, relishing the chance to take on the competition benchmark.
“Fifteen minutes and we would’ve been right in the mix (this afternoon),” he said.
“I watched the ‘Canes last night, they’re a very good team at the moment so another great challenge for us and really exciting thing for the boys to aim up to this week,” he said.
“I thought some of the ball in play stuff from our boys tonight was nice to watch so (it’s) another shot at a top team and for us to be contenders we want to play them, we need to play them to see where we’re at.”
The Waratahs are hoping to have Bernard Foley back after another concussion setback, while Tom Robertson might be a day short of overcoming his head knock, with just a five-day turnaround until their trip to Wellington.