With the race for Heineken Champions Cup qualification heating up in Conference B of the Guinness PRO14, Dai Young insists Cardiff Blues must focus on what's within their control as they head into the final two games of the regular season.
Young's side head to northern Italy to take on Benetton Rugby on Sunday before the season comes to a close with the visit of Edinburgh to Cardiff Arms Park on the following Monday.
Eight points separate Cardiff Blues and third-placed Scarlets, while Edinburgh sit in fifth place, six points behind but with two games in hand.
With guidelines for Guinness PRO14 sides to qualify for Europe's top table still to be confirmed ahead of the 2021/22 campaign, Young's side could potentially be reliant on other results going in their favour.
However, Young insists his squad refuse to look beyond their own tasks starting with Sunday's clash in Treviso.
The interim director of rugby said: "What we’ve got to do is win the next two games. Win the next two games and we’ll end up where we end up with it being out of our hands.
"We had two good results against Scarlets but prior to that we’d let a lot of points slip and put ourselves in a difficult position.
"So we were always chasing our tail heading into the last four or five games. We didn’t get the points we would’ve like against the Irish sides but we have two more opportunities to get points on the board.
"Hopefully that will be enough for us to get into the Champions Cup.
"You don’t get there from one or two results but from a season-worth of results, and if we don’t get there we’ll have to lick our wounds and look at how we improve to make sure next year, going into the last couple of games, that we’ll be in there.
"That’s what we need to do.
"We’re only focusing on the two games that we’ve got left and if we win those then hopefully that will be enough. It may not be, but hopefully it will."
Young's side were narrowly edged out in recent encounters against Munster and Connacht, with the Irish outfits finishing strongly to take the spoils.
According to the former Welsh international prop, there's a harsh lesson to be learnt from the defeats as he calls on his side to find ways of coming out on top in the tight contests: "If you look at the guys who have been involved over the last two weeks, it’s pretty much those players who will be involved again this week.
"Olly Robinson has come back into contention now and apart from that, we’re looking at a similar squad to what we’ve seen over the last couple of games.
"We go into games because we want to win every game. That’s our focus and I think we’ve had two positive performances without getting the result.
"We were good for big parts of the game against Connacht and we certainly were against Munster as well. But we have to learn quickly how to win games.
"With 10 to 15 minutes left in both games we were still within one score to winning but they managed the last quarter better than us.
"You talk about learning from losses and it’s important that we learn quickly because we’ve shown a lot of good stuff against good teams but have ultimately come away with nothing.
"You look at the league over the last couple of seasons and the Irish sides have been dominant, and it would be foolish to say that isn’t the case because the proof has been in the pudding.
"But we can improve as a squad and the other Welsh sides will feel exactly the same. It’s up to us to demonstrate that because talk is cheap at the end of the day.
"In those two games there we came up against the Connacht first team, who didn’t really have anyone out of contention, and a very strong Munster side.
"We weren’t too far away but ultimately the difference in both games was that they were used to winning and knew how to grind out the results in the last 15 to 20 minutes.
"We’ve shown that we can match teams for large parts of the games, but when games are tight we must know when to do the right things.
"It’s about game understanding which, in those tight games, is where we can turn narrow losses into narrow wins."