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East Kilbride Rugby Club 'have feelgood factor back' after winning shield tie over Wigtownshire
Franklin Clark says the feelgood factor is back at Torrance House after some clear-the-air talks helped them return to winning ways on Saturday.
The East Kilbride boss watched his side turn over Wigtownshire 33-5 to reach the last 16 of the National Shield and it came after a run of five straight defeats in the league.
Clark used a week off before the match to have an open discussion with his players about where it was going wrong, and believes that paid off with a good performance.
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He said: “It was a good win and it has cheered everybody up. There is certainly a feelgood factor back at the club, especially amongst the group of players because we had a real, frank, honest appraisal of where we were after the Cumnock game a couple of weeks ago.
“We looked back at some video and determined where we were going wrong, and how we were going to fix it.
“And it looks as if we did that on Saturday. The players were quite happy with the way we performed and how we changed things to make things better. That is always a step in the right direction.
“We were pretty happy with the way we were defending mostly, but we were having to defend more often than we should have been because we weren’t executing our attacking framework, which we got done early in pre-season and probably didn’t work on enough.
“We worked on that in the past couple of weeks and it paid dividends for us, so that was pretty pleasing. We revisited the way we wanted to attack and it took us a wee while to get into it. But I would say that after the first 20 minutes we were in control of the game.”
Tries from Evan Middleton, Gary Thornton, Justin Ludick, Mark Ellison and Roddy Beaton, plus a conversion and a penalty from the boot of Rory Blackwood did the damage on Saturday.
EK now have a week off due to the Scotland international with Portugal, but return on November 23 to face local rivals Cambuslang, who sit two place below seventh-place EK in the table.
And Clark says he actually welcomes the break to get more preparation in for the derby clash.
He said: “It was a pretty good team effort all in. The boys dug in, got the result we needed and, hopefully, we can take that form into the next game in a couple of weeks.
“The break give us another week to build into the Cambuslang game, which is pretty important for us. We need to get ourselves up the league.
“If you look at the league, our points against are the third best in the league but our points for is just not good enough.
“And that’s what we identified to try and sort out for the next game.”
On facing Oban in the next round of the Shield, Clark added: “When you get to the last 16 there are always going to be tough games.
“It will be tough but I am pretty confident we can get a result out of it if we play the way we did against Wigtownshire.”
