CORNISH Pirates director of rugby Ian Davies said he wants the side to get motivated for easier matches in the same way they do against the top teams.

The Welshman cut an unhappy figure after Sunday’s abject 30-13 defeat at home to Doncaster, who started the day second bottom and played for most of the match with 14 men after Bevon Armitage’s red card.

A fortnight earlier, the Pirates had performed brilliantly to inflict the first defeat of Bristol’s season, but this has been followed up with defeats against sides in the lower half of the Greene King IPA Championship table.

With Nottingham and Rotherham up next for the Pirates, Davies said they will be “rolling their sleeves up” to correct the problems from Sunday.

He also believes the side are struggling to get up for matches against teams they are expected to beat.

Davies: “It is easy to raise yourself against top sides like Bristol because there is that fear factor.

“I can tell you now though, the performance against Doncaster wasn’t good enough and there’ll certainly be a fear factor in training before we play Nottingham as a few guys are set for a hard couple of weeks if they want their shirt back.

“I’m sure the guys will be better in the next couple of games, especially with the Rotherham game being live on Sky, so it will be a chance to be in the shop window.

“But it is games that should be our bread and butter which we are not picking up points from and I know it is a development thing, but we cannot keep going up and down constantly.”

Reflecting on Sunday’s game, Davies said he was impressed with how Doncaster “galvanised” after having Armitage sent off.

However, he still felt a lot of the errors which cost the Pirates any chance of victory were of their own making.

Davies said: “We could try and find excuses.

“But at the end of the day, we had 22 players who did not perform and we can have no arguments about that.”