The reigning Guinness PRO12 champions scored six tries as they romped to a 42-12 home victory over Wayne Pivac’s men at the RDS on Saturday. A host of handling errors gave the Irish side the perfect platform to launch their attacking weapons – Rob Kearney and Ian Madigan both crossed twice as they took full advantage of their possession and territorial advantage.
And the Wales hooker is desperate for his Scarlets side to not give up the ball so easily when Benetton Treviso visit Parc y Scarlets on Saturday.
He said: “You can’t defend for as long as we did against such a talented team as Leinster. We were continuously on the back foot and it’s hard work when you have players like Jimmy Gopperth, Ian Madigan, Jamie Heaslip and their other danger men running at you all day.
“We weren’t accurate enough in our attack and when we turned the ball over it gave them the momentum to run at us freely all day.”
The front-rower, 27, is desperate to get his maiden victory as Scarlets captain after they failed improve on their opening round draw against Ulster. Their Italian opponents are also searching for their first victory of the season after they slipped to a 21-10 home defeat at the hands of Munster.
He said: “Our next game against Treviso is huge. We had three points against Ulster, nothing against Leinster; we need a massive performance against Treviso to get our season back on track and really push ourselves back up that table.”
Owens’ head coach Wayne Pivac is keen to put the the six-try defeat behind them and push on for a first win of the season against their Italian visitors.
He said: “It’ll be a big week. We have to take what we need to out of the Leinster game and move on. We’ll refocus for the next game and make sure when we get home that we can do what Leinster did — make the next opposition pay.
“We started well, but then a couple of poor decisions, a loose ball here and there and our reaction time to those sorts of things wasn’t good enough.”
