"We missed an awful lot of chances in the first half and I wasn't happy with our first half performance at all," said Evans, kicking off the post match press conference.

"In fact I wasn't happy with our second half performance either to be brutally frank," he added almost in the same breadth.

"We created a lot of try scoring opportunities particularly in the first half, which we didn't convert. I think we got two from about six clear chances."

"We butchered two five yard drives - badly. We had an overlap on the left hand side that frankly we should have walked in. There was a good cross kick which had a shocking bounce and it went dead. Viliame Satala dropped the ball from Greenwood under the posts, and frankly I was furious at half-time."

"I think they expected 'well done chaps you are 21-6 up' and then I thought we lost control of the game in the second half when they got back to 21-13 and they started to get their game going. I thought for about five minutes the momentum had swung against us, and that made me even more irritable."

"We had butchered four tries but as it turned out we scored a few more so it was all right. I'm sounding a bit churlish after a 47-23 win aren't I?"

But Evans had a point. Quins had only reached a position of strength at the break because of two very bad defensive lapses including seeing Jonny Wilkinson making an uncharacteristic mistake close to his own line, and a number of others shared Evans view that the game saw Quins gifted 14 points and then a further 19 when the visitors were reduced to 14 men.

"I'll sound like Brendan Venter if I start talking about performance, but he is absolutely right. It is about performance and that was not a great performance. It was all right, but it wasn't great."

"We have got our basics right. Our scrums were very strong and our driving game was good. Our set-pieces were pretty strong and gave us good field position."

"We kicked quite well, but our restarts were absolutely atrocious. I don't think that we took one off of our first five in the first half."

"One or two of our players came back - we've still got five first choices not playing, but we got three back today. Nick Duncombe made a difference at scrum half and he is always a threat now."

"Will came back and battled through although he's obviously lost a bit of match fitness, and Alex Codling came and played 60 minutes and he's quite important to us. Our back row played very well and they've been playing well for a month now."

"(Ace) Tiatia, (Tony) Diprose and (Pat) Sanderson are playing really well, although I just wish that Ace would stop getting a yellow card."

"I said to the guys pre-match that this was a pivotal game for us. We've had a bit of a tough time and went to Sale last week without eight first choice players and worked very hard and played with a lot of desire but just came up short."

"We missed a kick to win it, and they would have had to kick short to us, and if we caught that restart - although after today we wouldn't have - but we would have kicked it off and that would have been the ball game, but David (Slemen) unfortunately pushed it wide."

"So we went all that way last week and to play without so many of our frontline players and only come away with a point was really disappointing."

"But this week was a pivotal game. If we lost today we would have been on the back foot after the first run of games."

"I still don't think that we've had as good a start as I would have liked by any means, but our only poor performance was against Leeds at home when we did play really poorly."

"The others haven't been great but they've been solid - a bit like today, but our basics were good and we had a bit of shape about us."

"We've got 11 points from six games, which is not fantastic but it would have been really disappointing and put us in a hole if we lost today."