I SAID all along our Amlin Challenge Cup group would always come down to us and Perpignan and it ended up being decided by tries scored in the two games between us.

It is tough to have gone out of the competition like that and the structure of it definitely has to be looked at.

The Amlin Cup is a second tier competition, but you need to have four quality teams in each pool — it really needs to be restructured.

I am all up for the development of the smaller clubs like Gernika and Rovigo, but it is no good for these type of teams when they are having 80-odd points put on them at home.

Perpignan’s reward for winning our pool was a home tie with Toulouse after they were knocked out of the Heineken Cup by Leicester on Sunday — what a game that could have been for Worcester.

It just makes our exit from the Amlin Cup harder to stomach.

Playing Toulouse at Sixways would have been a fantastic game for us — these are the matches you want to be involved in.

Missing out on a game like that just highlights the importance to us of kicking on to finish in the top-six this season to qualify for next year’s Heineken Cup.

The huge Heineken Cup games like the ones that were played at the weekend are all that anyone wants to watch and the build-up to them generates so much excitement — it’s where we all want to be.

Hopefully, we can still get a top-six spot this season — we just need to pull our socks up and get some away wins. It has been more than a year since we won on the road in the league and we need to break that mentality.

After the next couple of weeks’ LV= Cup games, we are into the back half of the Aviva Premiership season, so we will be ready to gear up for a final push up the table.

It will be good to play London Irish away in the LV= Cup this weekend as we have been playing on some real quagmire pitches recently.

They have a great pitch at the Madejski Stadium which will hopefully allow us to express ourselves a little bit more.

Judging by their league position, they will be concentrating on Premiership games, while we will be putting a quality squad together for these LV= Cup matches.

We are in a great position at the top of our pool and it would be good for the club to make it through to the knock-out stages.

Meanwhile, it was great news to hear Matt Kvesic has been called up into the senior England training squad this week. He is an outstanding player and I noticed him as soon as I came to the club — he just has that extra edge all top players have and that is something you can’t coach.

I’m sure Matt will have a long England career ahead of him and it would be great to see him involved in this year’s Six Nations.

I’d love him to still be playing at Worcester next season — he is a homegrown lad having come through the club’s academy system, so hopefully he will want to stay here.

Also, Josh Drauniniu has signed a new contract recently and he is a cracking player who will keep gettting better and better. He knows where the try-line is and always has a hunger to score — there is loads more to come from him.

Finally, I’d like to say a massive thank you to all the supporters who helped clear the snow off the Sixways pitch before our European game with Gernika. Without your help, the game would not have gone ahead, so it was really appreciated by everyone at the club.