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Vern Cotter: Blues heading into playoffs with feet firmly on the ground
By Ned Lester
The Blues may have fallen short of their goal of a bonus point win over the Chiefs to secure the top seed heading into the Super Rugby Pacific playoffs, but they won’t let that undermine what was a strong win.
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The Aucklanders enjoyed fast starts to both the first and second halves, scoring all five of their tries in the first and third quarters of the contest. The Chiefs built their way into each of the periods and returned fire with three tries in the second and fourth quarters.
It was the final two efforts that made headlines though as Quinn Tupaea crossed with 13 minutes remaining, threatening the Blues’ bonus point lead, before Josh Ioane provided the final punch in the final minute.
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The race for the top seed was a hard-fought battle and as well as deciding the regular season’s best, it also provides home-field advantage throughout the playoffs.
The Blues, having finished second, will now enjoy home-field advantage so long as they don’t play the Hurricanes in the final. That’s a result coach Vern Cotter is proud of.
“If you had given me that score at the start of the season, I would have taken it over the Chiefs,” Cotter said after the win.
“If you want to win the title, you have to beat everybody, so it [finishing second] doesn’t matter.
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“There’ll be parts of that game we’ll review, and we’ll try and become better at it.”
Those final two tries specifically provide plenty of tape to review, and Cotter says it’ll humble his squad.
“We let them back in because we weren’t quite as effective or efficient in what we were doing.
“The danger of finishing first is that suddenly your feet lift off the ground. We know that we’ve got a lot of work to do. It wasn’t a total performance, but it was a good one.”
“We’ll make sure we put some good things in on Monday and build the week. We go into a knockout situation and we want another Monday to keep moving forward.”
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The coach said it’s also important to celebrate the win and embrace the positives.
“We will enjoy the fact that we qualified, enjoy the fact that we won the game at home in front of our crowd and then we shift into knockout rugby.”
The quarter-final contest that awaits is a hungry Fijian Drua outfit with no shortage of firepower.
Now is the time to bring everything learned through the season and put in three complete performances, and Cotter says he’s seen plenty from his leadership group that suggests they can bring it home.
“Paddy (Tuipulotu) and the boys are stepping up and taking everything on board.
“They’re ambitious, want to do well, and want to go as far as we can in the competition.
“We’ve had a good qualifying phase and now we need to do what we can do, learn from today and other games and become better when it matters.”
Let’s go boys