IT has been a really tough season for us this year and I’ve said before I’d have loved to have seen Warriors a couple of places further up the league table, battling it out for European qualification.

We have struggled, but there are changes being made at the club now and that is what people want to see. We will be back refreshed for pre-season and excited by the new challenge of working under Dean Ryan.

There are some great players at Worcester and the squad is capable of moving up the table, but we just didn’t get the results this campaign. We weren’t good enough this season, but we have to kick on now.

It has been a story of ‘if only’ but I am fed up of the excuses.

Cecil Duckworth and the other owners are putting money into the club and they want to see results — that is the harsh reality of professional sport.

We are all excited about working with Dean Ryan — he has massive experience, he speaks well on Sky and people who have worked with him in the past say he wants everything done perfectly.

It will be new ideas and a fresh face — I’ve been in this situation before in my career and people always react well.

Dean will bring with him a different style of play, game-plan and structure for how he will want us to play.

We are looking forward to going out there against London Welsh on Saturday and just enjoying the game and we will be desperately trying to break our losing run away from Sixways.

It will be the last time a lot of this squad play together and, although that happens every year in rugby, we will be trying to give those guys a good send-off.

Some of them are moving on to other clubs and we wish them well, while we will also say goodbye to the likes of Matt Kvesic and Matt Mullan and hopefully they can go on to have good international careers too.

London Welsh will be wanting to go out with a bang and it has been tough for them this year with the points deduction and the legal battle before their promotion was confirmed.

They had little time to put a squad together, so those same guys have pretty much had to play week in, week out, which is unrealistic these days — you need a big squad of players so you can rotate and rest guys.

All things considered, they still had a great season, but these things happen, so they will want to finish well and I am expecting there to be a big, noisy crowd supporting them in Oxford. It should be a bit of an atmosphere, but we will be going out to spoil the party.

I watched the Heineken Cup semi-finals on television this weekend and I thought the match between Clermont and Munster was an exciting contest and exactly what European rugby is all about. However, I fell asleep during the Saracens-Toulon game!

There were some outstanding individual performances and Jonny Wilkinson was the difference, but each side only made two line-breaks during the whole game.

It will now be an all-French final in this year’s Heineken Cup, and that says all you need to know about where the game is these days.