Hill facing up to tough times

Hill: relegation battle

We keep thinking the next game we will start to play a bit better and we have to. We've shown glimpses of it but until we make a significant improvement and get to where we know we can play it's going to be a very worrying second half of the season.

Richard Hill
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Bristol head coach Richard Hill admitted his bottom-of-the-table side could face a bleak 2009.

The west country men stay rooted to the foot of the Guinness Premiership following their 30-8 defeat at Northampton.

Hill said: "On that performance we are going to struggle. We have been playing to about 50% of our potential and we are going to have to start to play better at some stage.

"We keep thinking the next game we will start to play a bit better and we have to. We've shown glimpses of it but until we make a significant improvement and get to where we know we can play it's going to be a very worrying second half of the season.

"I just know how well we can play and at the moment we're not transferring the training work we do on to the pitch.

"I'm looking at how we planned to play and I genuinely couldn't see anything we practised to do against Northampton. There's a whole host of things we said we were going to do and we didn't do it. It gets very frustrating."

To add to Hill's woes, he expects former England hooker Mark Regan to be ruled out for between four and six weeks after pulling a calf muscle.

Regan came off second-best against Dylan Hartley, England's current number two hooker who was watched by Graham Rowntree, the England scrum coach and British and Irish Lions forwards coach.

Challenge

Hartley is mounting a serious challenge to Bath's Lee Mears as England hooker for the Six Nations and Jim Mallinder, the Northampton director of rugby, said: "Dylan is maturing. He is working hard on his set-piece and his mental skills. It was a big challenge for him today against Mark and I thought he came through it well."

Mallinder was also impressed by full-back Ben Foden, who wore the number 15 shirt ahead of skipper Bruce Reihana.

The coach added: "I'm really pleased how he played for us today at full-back but he's played well at scrum-half as well this season.

"To have somebody who can play both positions is a bonus. He knows where the try-line is and he can certainly finish."