Harris looking ahead to strong second half of season and ending 'careless mistakes'

Following Saturday's AIL Div 2A defeat to UL Bohemians, Navan head coach Jason Harris Wright spoke to the Meath Chronicle to reflect on the loss.

Harris Wright acknowledged that the performance was positive but made the point that his player's individual mistakes in high-pressure moments cost them the result today.

“Yeah, there were positives, I just said to the group there that it was a positive performance but we can't keep coming here all year and getting no result," he said.

"What has been happening all year is that we are beating ourselves. We are doing so much good in games but we are not getting over the line and it is our own errors that are costing us.

“Today, we scored a try and we went into the lead, we dropped the kickoff and then they came back and scored. Then we throw a ball into the ground and they picked it up and ran the length and scored. That’s a constant theme at the moment which is pretty frustrating and something we need to fix if we are going to win games.”

The former Leinster and Connacht hooker had challenged his forwards this week to put in a big performance and they delivered a good performance. However for Harris Wright that makes defeat an even harder pill to swallow.

“We laid a challenge out to our forwards this week about trying to get some dominance up front in terms of our scrum and maul. There was plenty of good work there, which is positive but again it's nearly more frustrating to not get a result when all that good work was put in.”

The extremely blustery conditions played a huge role in the match and when they were against the wind in the first half Navan managed the tough circumstances quite well. However, Harris Wright did concede that they could have made more use of the advantage of having the wind at their back in the second half.

“We spoke about the conditions when we arrived, we just needed to narrow up everything. Obviously, when it is that windy you are a bit more limited in what you can do. At the lineout in particular but even when we were spreading balls to our backs and that.

"We actually managed it quite well in the first half I thought. But we definitely should have managed the second half better when we had the wind at our backs. Unfortunately, it didn’t play out like that.”

Despite being on a poor run of form at the moment in terms of results, the head coach is optimistic that his players can turn their fortunes around, particularly when some key players return to the set-up after the Christmas break.

“Yeah, we had a good start to the season and we have kind of tapered off. You know we have been on the wrong side of a few results but look there are still plenty of games left and we have a couple of key lads coming back into the frame after Christmas, so that will hopefully strengthen us and we can have a good second half of the season."