by Ethan Harris
THE Cardiff Blues were unable to push past Munster as they fell to a 23-33 defeat at Cardiff Arms Park.
Two tries from Alby Mathewson and one apiece from Chris Cloete and Calvin Nash were enough to see the visitors past the Welsh contingent on another disappointing evening for John Mulvihill’s side.
Corey Domachowski and Nick Williams managed scores either side of the half for the home side, but ultimately the hosts never got going in the key moments of the game.
And Mulvihill was disappointed with the individual errors in his squad on the night.
“We hadn’t given a penalty away in the first 20 minutes of the second-half, and then we gave five consecutive penalties away, with three one-on-one missed tackles to give up three tries,” Mulvihill said.
“That part of it wasn’t good enough and that’s what the players got just then.
“It’s one-on-one missed tackles, when teams get to the back-field and have good supporters that’s pretty hard to stop, but if you go back to where it came from it would be an individual error in missing a tackle, and it’s pretty tough then to get in behind the ball.
“I was quite animated, I’ll be positive on Monday, but I’ve been positive after every game so far this year, and at some stage they actually need to hear how I felt about our performance.
“They did, I think they’ll take it on board and we’ll be better for it on Monday.”
It’s now four losses on the bounce for the Blues after an opening week victory against the Southern Kings, and Mulvihill admitted that it was a difficult period for his side.
Despite their poor form, the Cardiff boss saw glimpses of some positive rugby from his players that would give the fans something to take away from the game.
“I think the first three weeks of last year were pretty tough, but we’re not far away from that time,”
“But we’re also not far away from getting it right too.
“There were glimpses tonight that were really good, I thought our scrum had improved massively and our line-out was quite good.
“When we used the ball in the areas we wanted to, I thought we looked great but if you give up easy scores against you, it’s hard to keep pegging them back.
“We were good enough for the first sixty minutes, at 16-13 we probably should have scored a try in that passage of play and we weren’t clinical enough to finish them off.
“They were clinical tonight when they finished, when they made line-breaks, they finished them off.”
