The 4ED Stadium in Hartpury has been a tough place for anyone to go with only a handful of sides picking up a win in the West Country this season, however, Scottish did fall well below expectations on Saturday. In this week’s Stat Bunker brought to you by Cairnhill we dive into why that was and what the stats tell us heading into the run in of the season.
Coventry edged the key stats on the day with a marginal gain in possession and territory across the eighty minutes. Outside of this a lot of the topline stats were almost identical, both sides carried around 100 times for about 350m.
In defence both made 150 tackles, where the two sides diverged was in tackle success rate with Hartpury having a 5% differential against the Exiles leading to them making 7 clean breaks to 2 and beating 9 more defenders than the Scots.
The set-piece was relatively evenly contested as well. Both sides struggled in a strong breeze at the line out only winning 70% of their ball. Both sides had 100% records on their own ball at the scrum.
Hartpury were more successful at the maul with Scottish failing at one out of their four mauls. Scottish also had some issues at scrum time, giving away three penalties allowing Hartpury field position.
Lewis Barrett led the way this week for London Scottish notching up a Champ impact score 7.7 for his display on Saturday. Lewis put in five carries on the weekend, score a try in the dying minutes whilst also making twelve tackles and eleven ruck entries across his eighty minutes.
Elsewhere, Oli Duncan put in a strong showing with 17 tackles and 10 carries in his game. Noah Ferdinand and Will Simonds also both put in over ten carries on the day with Bailey Ransom and Tom Wilstead both putting in over ten tackles during the game.
Scottish’s discipline was their undoing at the weekend, the Exiles gave away 20 penalties across the eighty minutes. When a strong benchmark is often 10, this was far too many to have any success, especially against a side with such a strong kicking game.
Accuracy on the ball was also a problem, Scottish coughed up the ball on fifteen occasions, with ten of these being unforced errors. These are key areas the Exiles need to improve upon to get back in these games. However, these are also largely easy fixes for the squad, if they can turn this around in the short term a much improved performance in a week’s time.
