WASPS second-row Marco Wentzel says his side are in a positive frame of mind ahead of the New Year’s Day clash with Worcester despite their six-try hammering at Gloucester last time out.

Former Leeds lock Wentzel has been handed the Wasps captain’s armband with regular skipper John Hart sidelined through injury for a lengthy spell, but was powerless to stop Gloucester racking up a 39-10 Boxing Day victory at Kingsholm.

However, the experienced two-cap South African international says his team have already moved on from the result at Gloucester ahead of the big game on Sunday at Adams Park.

Wentzel said: “Worcester are a good side, a very physical team and I am sure they will target breakdown having seen a few cracks in what we did last week.

“Like us, they know there are a hell of a lot of games to go in the Premiership and they will be fighting too for every point. It will be a fight, but we enjoy a good tussle so it’s going to be a big 80 minutes for both sides.”

On the Kingsholm defeat, he added: “We were all very disappointed with the game at Gloucester and we’re doing a lot of work this week looking at what went wrong and what we need to improve.

“We’ve already moved forward positively. Reviewing our last game, it was clear that we made a lot of uncharacteristic mistakes.

“Defensively we weren’t good but, through the rest of the games in the league so far, we were one of the better teams defensively so we’re not going to start drastically changing things.

“You can’t sit here and simply dwell on what went wrong last week. It was a bad loss for us for sure, but I wouldn’t say we were totally outplayed, we lost the game through silly errors we made and we can fix that.”