Cardiff Blues coach Dai Young admitted his team need to step up their performance level despite making a winning start to their Heineken Cup campaign.
Cardiff posted an 18-17 victory over Edinburgh at the Cardiff City Stadium but Young immediately raised the bar for his team. "We didn't play as well as we'd like, but Edinburgh always cause us problems," he said. "They matched our physicality, and were always dangerous with ball in hand. But most of their breakaways and line breaks were caused by our inaccuracies."
Young also agreed that the 14 points which were lost because of the wayward kicking of the normally reliable Dan Parks made life harder than it needed to be. "It would be nice to have had that buffer, but there are some games when you have to roll your sleeves up and grind out the victory, and it was like that tonight."
Young appreciates his side must do better if they wish to succeed at Castres next weekend. "We know we've got to improve," he said. "We're expecting a real tough physical battle, and we know how hard it is to win in France. We'll need to be at our best."
His Edinburgh counterpart, Rob Moffat, was happy with what he described as "a gutsy effort", but still lamented the loss. "We weren't far away," Moffat said. "But it's not enough to be good losers. We made some basic errors which stopped us building pressure, and we gave away two or three daft penalties in the first half. We were lucky that Dan Parks missed them.
"At least we picked up a losing bonus point and that could prove to be vital because this group is going to be tight."