Ben Vellacott pinpointed Edinburgh’s struggles to accumulate bonus points, misfiring attack and one particularly shocking home defeat as reasons for their URC failure.
The capital club flopped spectacularly in a must-win game against Benetton in Treviso on Saturday, collapsing to a 31-6 defeat when victory would have sent them to the playoffs.
A bruising afternoon in the Italian sunshine saw Edinburgh slide from seventh – which would have brought Champions Cup qualification as well as a place in the knockouts – to 10th on the final day of the regular season.
That abruptly brought an end to an underwhelming campaign but scrum-half Vellacott looked all the way back to their first meeting with the Italians, a 24-22 defeat at the Hive Stadium in November, when assessing where things went wrong
“I believe that our home loss to Benetton was a major setback for us. That was a pivotal point in the season, according to Vellacott.
“We’ve been lacking this season in terms of either losing bonus points or scoring tries, or failing to pick up bonus points against teams when we should have.”
“Unlike in past seasons, our offensive hasn’t quite performed as well as we had hoped. However, we’ve made progress in other aspects of our game where we previously faltered.
In 2022–2023 Edinburgh won 11 league games, five more than the previous season and their greatest total in four years.
This includes four road wins, which included a noteworthy victory over Ulster in December, and thrilling wins at home against the Lions, South Africa’s top team and the Bulls.
But only five bonus points were earned by Sean Everitt’s team (three try bonuses and two loss bonus points), which was second-lowest in the league only to the second-place Dragons.
Vellacott went on, “The important thing for us is evaluating the performances over the course of the season.”
“At Ulster, we pulled off a significant away victory—something the team hasn’t done in a very long time. For us, defeating the South African teams at home has been crucial.
“But we’ve been inconsistent at times, and we’ve had some soft moments that have killed us, like our home loss to Benetton.”
“We proved last week that we can compete with the best of the best, as seen by our impressive performance against Munster, who won it the previous year the table. We just have to be better at our decision making.”
Despite being the league’s top scorer with 175 points at the end of the regular season, Edinburgh fly-half Ben Healy’s offensive game fell short in former Sharks boss Everitt’s first season in charge of the capital club.
After 18 URC games, Edinburgh scored 22 fewer tries than they did in 2022–2023; Vellacott acknowledged that something needs to change.
We must achieve a sound equilibrium. We were really attack-minded and let up a lot of easy tries over the past couple of years, which damaged us, he remarked.
We’ve played really solid defence this season, and we’ve had some good kickers.
We must strike a balance between the areas where our defence and assault can strengthen. We’ll succeed.
