Deano: Performance more pleasing than league position
The Falcons ran in 21 second-half points to achieve their first league win at the Twickenham Stoop in 18 years, Richards stating: “Where we end is where we end up, and that’s honestly not something I spend any time worrying about.
“People are only human, and yes, they’ll have one eye on the fact that we’ve climbed into the top four. That’s great and I’m not pretending it isn’t pleasing, but the only thing that matters to me is that we give our best performance every week.
“Everybody keeps asking me about top six, top four, top whatever, and I honestly don’t give a toss.
“All I care about is that the guys perform as well as they can, and we’ll see where that takes us. What we definitely have is a very hard-working squad with a huge amount of ability, and we’re only just starting to see the rewards of all the painstaking effort which has been put in over the past five or six years.
“I almost don’t care about our league position if we continually play to the best of our ability, and if we do that on a regular basis then the rest will look after itself. This was a very pleasing result, especially with a bonus point, but we’ll put it to bed by Monday and move onto Gloucester away next weekend.”
Drawing 7-7 at half-time and enjoying by far the greater territory and possession, Richards said: “There was a lot of endeavour in the first half but we lacked a little bit of accuracy.
“If anything we probably had more scoring opportunities in the first half than the second, but it wasn’t until the second half that we showed the composure needed to take those chances.
“I hope people understand the importance of this win. We’ve not won here in the league for 18 years, we played into the wind during the first half and we put in a huge shift. Had we been more clinical earlier on we would have been further ahead, but we kept going and didn’t panic.
“Earlier on there had been three-on-ones out wide where we just didn’t show that degree of control and understanding in terms of selecting the right options, but we executed better after half-time, were incredibly clinical and I thought that second half was one of our best halves of the season.
“It’s 18 years since we won here, the significance of the result is huge for us and I’m not going to downplay it. That said, we’ll put the game behind us on Monday morning, move on to the next one and look to build, because there’s nothing to be gained by dwelling for too long on a game which has already been played.”
Newcastle Falcons’ next home game is on March 24 when they play Northampton Saints in ‘The Big One’ at St James’ Park. Tickets are available by [**clicking here**][1].
[1]: https://www.eticketing.co.uk/newcastle-falcons/EDP/Event/Index/1320
