Wayne Pivac has admitted his Scarlets are facing exactly the kind of situation he had warned they must avoid.
Before their opening Heineken Champions Cup tie at home to Racing 92, the head coach had sounded certain that history would not repeat itself – the team that reached last season’s semi-finals would not recover this time from losing their opening two matches.
But with Saturday night’s 14-13 home defeat to the French club, the Scarlets will be in familiar territory if they lose away to Leicester Tigers on Friday night. The Tigers began their campaign with a 24-10 defeat at Ulster.
“We want to win our home games, they go a long way to helping you,” said Pivac.
“We dropped our first home game last year, the Bath game in similar sort of conditions. We’re disappointed that we didn’t control those last ten minutes.
“We’ve got to have a very good week, review the game, not make the same errors that we did this evening and we’ll get excited about the opportunity to kick-start the campaign.”
The French side were trailing 13-7 in the final minutes when referee Matthew Carley awarded Racing a penalty try and also sent scrum-half Gareth Davies to the sin bin, and from there, the visitors held on to win.
Racing’s two tries came at the end of the first and second halves with a losing bonus point being little consolation for Scarlets, who led for most of the match and would have been out of reach if Leigh Halfpenny had kicked with his normal accuracy.
Scarlets touched down through Davies and winger Jonny McNicholl in each half, while Halfpenny added a solitary penalty.
“We just talked in the changing room about how disappointed we are but how we’ve got six days to turn it around and kick start our competition,” added Pivac.
“We were disappointed to go into half-time 7-3 down because we conceded right on the whistle. We made a lot of errors in the first 20 to 30 minutes and we didn’t have much territory or possession either.
“I’m disappointed, but we know we have to be better and Leicester away next Friday night is a good opportunity for us to bounce back.”
Racing’s Simon Zebo said: “The game turned into a bit of a kick-fest, but we got the luck and it’s not very often Leigh misses two kicks at goal. Momentum is a funny thing and this is a great result for us to start the tournament.”
