Brian Smith Playing Quotations

Now that we have reached the business end of the season managing our playing resources becomes even more important.

We were able to bring a lot of people off the bench. We were able to stay fresh. We have a lot of guys pushing our starters for playing time.

Ryan Strudwick is an exceptional rugby player and person. I knew of him long before I came to London Irish and was aware of the high regard with which he is held throughout the professional rugby playing community in this country and abroad. He has been a remarkable servant of London Irish over the past eight years and ranks among the great ambassadors of the club and the game. While there will be an opportunity to say a proper farewell before he leaves at the end of the season I want to take this opportunity to express publicly the gratitude of the directors, management, players and supporters for all he has done.

The guys have played with the attitude (that) nobody really respects them and nobody really thinks they can win. We don't mind playing the underdog role and I think there's a lot of people that thought we were the underdog at the 4 seed and we shouldn't have been seeded fourth, and that's fine. Those are people's opinions, but we've won 16 of our last 18 games right now and we're just on a roll.

The guys started trusting each other more. We started playing as a team.