John Mulvihill was thrilled to see his side display their attacking instinct during the bonus point victory over Connacht on Saturday.
After securing a gritty, hard-fought opening day victory over Zebre last week, with a performance built on a solid and stubborn defence, the Cardiff Blues backline flexed their muscles to cross for four tries at Rodney Parade, coming away with maximum points in the process.
Mulvihill was delighted to also see his continue with the defensive effort shown in Parma, as they maintained a winning start to the Guinness PRO14 campaign.
“We lifted the intensity again from last week. Last week we drew the maturity to get out of our own end, but didn’t really bring our attacking game,” said the head coach.
“But today we were good coming out of our end but also had that sharpness in attack and that’s what we wanted to bring. That was the focus for the week.
“We knew that Connacht are a good team who are well coached, and we knew they were going to come at us hard around the rucks.
“We had to aim up tonight, physically, and keep getting up and getting back in the line.
“The on-field leaders stepped up really well and put us in the right positions on the pitch.
“We hadn’t touched the ball for 15 minutes when they scored in the second half, and we had a yellow card.
“But all we needed to do after that was get the ball in the right areas of the park, and we knew that we could put them under pressure.
“In every game that you play, the opposition will own the game for some period of time. It’s about limiting that time, and I think we’ve done that well tonight.
“We’ve really focused on getting good performances during training in the week, and also fronting up when it comes to the weekend.
“We haven’t spoken about winning games, it’s about getting ourselves right each week.
“Now we can dust ourselves off, have a light week next week and really bounce into what is a long preparation ahead of Munster away on a Monday night.
“It’s a really good pitch here in Newport, and the boys have enjoyed playing here and we’ll keep coming here as long as we have to.”
While six Cardiff Blues players were named in the Wales squad for the autumn series earlier this week, it was disappointment for some of their team-mates who had targeted a place in Wayne Pivac’s plans.
However, Mulvihill had nothing but praise for the attitude and maturity shown by those players who missed out on selection, as the likes of Jarrod Evans, Shane Lewis-Hughes, Lloyd Williams and Hallam Amos proved a point with some eye-catching performances.
“They had an opportunity to go one of two ways. They can either sulk about it or they can get on with it.
“And as you saw tonight, they got on with it, and they got on with it really quickly as well.
“As soon as they heard the news, they flew into training on that day, and you could see that there was a bit of a change.
“There was a steel to bring a good performance tonight.
“Congratulations to those boys because lesser men might’ve left that performance in the shed tonight.”