Pivac unhappy with Scarlets’ winning performance

The Scarlets continued their winning run, in this season’s PRO12 campaign, with an historic victory over Italians Zebre Rugby on Sunday afternoon.

The victory over Zebre, at their Stadio Lanfranchi home, was the Scarlets’ seventh consecutive victory and a fifth consecutive victory away from home – their best ever run in the competition

Scarlets remain the only Welsh region not to lose a game against Zebre at their Italian home, having beaten Blues and Ospreys in 2014 and Dragons in 2015.

Speaking after the game Scarlets Head Coach Wayne Pivac said: “Last year we left it to the last minute and we wanted to change things up today. We didn’t train well at the start of the week but it’s the same for everybody with the downtime.”

No points were surrendered by Scarlets in the second half coming back from an 8-6 deficit at half time to win the game 8-20 but Head Coach Pivac was disappointed with his side’s performance. He went on to say: “We’re certainly not happy with the performance, the first half in particular.

“We pretty much came second across the park. We rectified some of it in the second half but there are no excuses, we got ahead of ourselves.”

A more composed, less error-strewn effort in the second half kept Zebre away from the tryline and more importantly kept the penalty count down. The half time team talk paid dividends for Scarlets with Pivac going on to say: “We talked about standards we’d set in the first two rounds and the fact that our attitude decides the result, either way.

“We’re certainly happy to be going home and having three home games. We’ve set ourselves a target of top four by the end of the World Cup but this group has some work to do after today.”