PLAY-OFF week three: Two down, seven to go.

Yes, it was far from perfect and, yes, we struggled to get ourselves into the match but we can tick London Welsh off for now.

All credit to London Welsh — as we expected they came out of the blocks flying and we found ourselves coming up shy in matching their physicality.

They, like Bristol, managed to string together multiple phases and established themselves in the game from the start.

We, however, spent the first five minutes defending and not in a position to build our innings. I do believe this is an easy thing to address and we will hopefully start games better as of this Friday against Nottingham.

Due to the first five minutes, we were always in for a tough ride in the first-half. These teams are very capable of competing while they are fresh and if they have a chance to string phases together.

We did make things harder for ourselves than they had to be. What we can take from the first-half is our ability to stay in touch in games despite playing well bellow our capabilities.

The fact that we managed to go in at half-time ahead, although by a single point, showed once we got things right we would turn Welsh over.

Another positive from the first-half was Tevita Taumopeau’s show-and-go followed by real pace in behind, the like of which I have honestly never seen from him before!

Miles Benjamin had better keep scoring his tries otherwise Big T may just have to slot in.

At half-time, we felt we had let ourselves down. We knew Welsh would again come flying at us and it may take a good while before we finally took hold of the game.

This was indeed the case but, looking back now, it was all very avoidable had we not made some basic errors. We missed touch when we cleared our lines, we ran down dead-ends and turned ball over and I dropped a decent pass when we should have made 20-plus metres.

All these errors meant the Londoners could capitalise.

Then we managed to get a hold of the game thanks to some massive effort up-front. Aleki Lutui once again carried the whole team forward — literally — to create a good platform to attack from.

Greg Rawlinson made a huge impact with his physicality and our superior fitness came to light.

Our centres continued their great form and were always on hand when we needed the backs to carry hard and gain valuable metres up field.

What can I say about Miles? He is scoring for fun at the minute.

Teams will begin to target him, but the beauty of that is we have Marcel Garvey waiting patiently to pounce.

Nottingham are the next obstacle standing in our way of promotion as we meet them twice in two weeks. I don’t remember the last time I faced a team back-to-back like this, but it will be a good test.

The East Midlands side have started their play-off campaign well with two try-scoring bonus points and a strong 43-25 win over Bristol.

They will be very keen on throwing a spanner in the works to try and falter our progression through to the semis.

However, as they are one of only two other teams to have applied for promotion to the Premiership, (the other being Bristol) over the course of the next two weeks, we can spoil their plans instead.

For us, the focus will be on playing more consistently for 80 minutes. It doesn’t worry me too much that we haven’t clicked for the full game yet.

As long as we do for the latter stages, that is ultimately when it matters the most.