Davies focused on Scarlets

Jonathan Davies will keep thoughts of the British & Irish Lions in the back of his mind as he concentrates on the Scarlets' RaboDirect PRO12 title bid. [more]

Davies focused on Scarlets

Jonathan Davies will keep thoughts of the British & Irish Lions in the back of his mind as he concentrates on the Scarlets’ RaboDirect PRO12 title bid.

The centre was named in Warren Gatland’s 37-man squad last week but remains fully focussed on the Welsh region’s play-off clash with Ulster tomorrow night.

“You just have to concentrate on your job for the Scarlets,” said Davies.

“Doing the best I can for the Scarlets is important for me. We’ve had a few important games so it was easy to focus on those.”

The west Wales region were humiliated by Benetton Treviso in their last match of the regular season.

But head coach Simon Easterby, a Lions tourist in 2005, is confident the Scarlets can put things right at Ravenhill.

“Everything is fixable from my end," said Easterby.

"We are a far better team than what we showed against Treviso.

"We are in the play-offs, but we know we have a lot of work to do to go to Ulster and put in a performance that is a million miles from what we showed on Friday.

"There is not a huge amount we can do at this stage of the season in terms of changing things on the training field, but mentally it is about getting the players into the right frame of mind.

"What's been good up until now is what we should be looking at, not necessarily what happened on Friday.

"We have a couple of bumps and a few sore and battered egos as well.

"Sometimes that can be a bit of a driving force. Hopefully, that will be the case this week.

"We have gone into the last two games as favourites and we haven't really lived with that, we have struggled to perform under pressure.

"But we have to be a little pragmatic about it. We were poor and there are no excuses, but we have an opportunity to put it right and we make sure that whatever happens in Belfast we put in a performance that is worthy of the jersey, the region and what we stand for. Friday night wasn't close to that.

"The Treviso defeat does hurt, we have disappointed a lot of fans, but we have also given them a fair bit to cheer about up until this point."

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