It was a day where things seemed to go wrong for the Blues at Cambridge on Saturday, and that all started during the warm-up when Fin Back pulled out for treatment when he felt that something was wrong with his thigh.
“The annoying thing is that he came off the other night because he got a dead leg type thing in the cheek of his bum, but that had settled down,” manager Paul Simpson said. “On Friday he said he got another whack, and he had a dead leg at the top of his thigh.
“He said he’d be ok to play, and we thought he was going to be ok, but then he had to drop out. He told us about it yesterday and maybe I’ve made a mistake by listening to him, because he wanted to play.
“He said he’d be fine, but maybe I should have made the decision and told him he wasn’t playing. He’s been doing well of late and if he tells me he’s alright then I don’t know how his thigh is feeling.
“As soon as he started warming up he said he couldn’t do it, which is annoying, but we’d lined Ben up for it on Friday.
“We told him if Fin wasn’t right then he would play so he needed to be aware of what jobs he had to do. Ben was ready to step in, I’m probably just a bit annoyed with myself that I didn’t make that decision so we didn’t have any disruption. There’s a mistake been made there by whoever.”
“My understanding is that it’s a dead leg for Fin,” he continued. “I didn’t even know about the top of his thigh dead leg until Friday in training, when he said he was feeling it a little bit, so we nursed him through it.
“Fin’s a strong character, I listened to him, but I probably should have made that call. Because he was struggling , Ben Barclay had sort of shadowed him and followed everything that his role was, it just doesn’t look very good when you’re having to make a change in the warm-up, and I’ve got to think about that decision I made.
“Ben did ok, to be fair. He had a tough job today because Kaikai, and Janneh and then JK coming on, he had three tough opponents to face, lads with real pace about them.
“When you look at what we’ve got in comparison, they’ve got far more pace than us and that’s something we’ve got to try and add to the group.
“I thought he stuck to his job well. I don’t blame Ben for the defeat today, Ben was one of a group of players who as a collective, and staff as well, we’re all in it as a collective, we haven’t performed well enough.”