Dai Young insists he learnt a lot about his wider squad in Cardiff Blues’ Guinness PRO14 Rainbow Cup opener against Ospreys.
A young Cardiff side took on an experienced Ospreys outfit, but the hosts ultimately proved too strong, running away with a 36-14 victory on a sunny afternoon in Swansea.
However, Max Llewellyn and debutant Ellis Bevan both crossed for their first competitive scores for the club.
Young believes there were both positives and negatives in the performance, but it was a very worthwhile fixture from a wider context.
“The big thing for me, coming into the club, was the importance of seeing what we’ve got here,” said the director of rugby.
“That was obviously the mentality coming into today’s game, and a lot of those guys haven’t played much since I’ve been here.
“They’re all contracted for next year so the biggest thing for me was to see what strength in depth we have at the club.
“I had a few answers today, some of which are positives and some were negative.
“We were up against a much more experienced team. There was only going to be one winner and they deservedly won that game.
“They won most areas of that game but the two tries that came from charge downs in the first half probably killed the game for us.
“I was pleased with some aspects of our game but disappointed with other parts. Defensively, for big parts of the game, we did really well.
“But we were inaccurate when we were with the ball, with some of our kicks being loose and giving them an opportunity to run back at us.
“Our discipline and some of the penalties we gave away were needless and in the first half we only got over three phases on four or five occasions.
“But when we did get over three phases, we looked dangerous. And that was the message at half time - we needed to be far more accurate with the ball and we also had to improve our set piece.
“In the second half, we were better but we were playing against a team who were far more experienced and had more bullets in the gun.”