Davis said the high performance panel examined the main reasons why the Waratahs had started 2021 slowly but agreed results needed to change soon.
“We can’t have any more losses if we’re going to have a successful season. There are too few matches,” Davis said.
“The situation we’re in has many factors. We’ve lost a lot of key talent, we’ve got a young side, we haven’t executed well, we have weaknesses in key aspects of play. Our scrum is not good. Defence as you saw against the Brumbies, there were problems.
“The ability to pivot our game strategy to respond to what the opposition is doing; you can go in with a plan but you’ll find successful teams are like successful armies, the ones that excel are the ones that can adapt quickly on the field. I don’t think we’ve shown that ability as yet. Some players aren’t playing well. We’ve got selection issues there. We’ve got 20 per cent of our side, including our captain, who are not playing at the moment.
“There’s a lot of issues that need to be addressed. Performance is not where we need it to be and so our challenge last night was to identify ways that would improve that performance. There were many ideas discussed and we’ll work through that over the next few days to make sure we can execute accordingly.”
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The group will present recommendations to the NSW board, which will assess what changes need to be made before the team’s next match against the Melbourne Rebels on March 19.
“It’s a cohort of experts that will wish to have their voice heard and their solutions listened to and we’ll bat that around,” Davis said. “We’ll obviously talk to Rob and see what he says and what we think is going on. It’s probably a timely break for us. It gives us a chance to contemplate at leisure but without in any way removing a sense of urgency.
“This talk of crisis and a world in turmoil probably exaggerates the extent of the problem. Is it the player list? Is it the coach? Is it the fact we have a lack of experience, maturity, leadership? Or just pure bad luck? We should have won against the Force given we were up by 13 points, went down by four.
“If we had that win I think all this debate and sensationalism would have dissipated. That was a game we should have won and didn’t. The Brumbies game was an embarrassment. Queensland wasn’t much better.”
