East Kilbride Rugby Club 'have feelgood factor back' after winning shield tie over Wigtownshire

Franklin Clark says the feelgood factor is back at Torrance House after some clear-the-air talks helped them return to winning ways on Saturday.

The East Kilbride boss watched his side turn over Wigtownshire 33-5 to reach the last 16 of the National Shield and it came after a run of five straight defeats in the league.

Clark used a week off before the match to have an open discussion with his players about where it was going wrong, and believes that paid off with a good performance.

He said: “It was a good win and it has cheered everybody up. There is certainly a feelgood factor back at the club, especially amongst the group of players because we had a real, frank, honest appraisal of where we were after the Cumnock game a couple of weeks ago.

“We looked back at some video and determined where we were going wrong, and how we were going to fix it.

“And it looks as if we did that on Saturday. The players were quite happy with the way we performed and how we changed things to make things better. That is always a step in the right direction.

“We were pretty happy with the way we were defending mostly, but we were having to defend more often than we should have been because we weren’t executing our attacking framework, which we got done early in pre-season and probably didn’t work on enough.

“We worked on that in the past couple of weeks and it paid dividends for us, so that was pretty pleasing. We revisited the way we wanted to attack and it took us a wee while to get into it. But I would say that after the first 20 minutes we were in control of the game.”

Tries from Evan Middleton, Gary Thornton, Justin Ludick, Mark Ellison and Roddy Beaton, plus a conversion and a penalty from the boot of Rory Blackwood did the damage on