GAVIN Cattle says his Cornish Pirates side must look at the ‘bigger picture’ rather than worry too much about their shortcomings in this season’s Premiership Rugby Cup.

Sunday’s 43-7 loss at Exeter Chiefs was their fifth in as many starts in this competition and leaves them at the foot of Pool E with just one game remaining.

The Pirates will wrap up their cup campaign at home to fellow Championship side Hartpury on Saturday (2.30pm) – after which they will then have a four-week break before they resume Championship duties against London Scottish on March 21.

The break, it has to be said, will come at a good time for the Pirates who, in recent weeks, have had to contend not only with a mounting injury list, but also the recall of a number of dual-registered players to their parent clubs.

To their credit, the Pirates have continued to battle on, earning praise from both Cattle and fellow head coach Alan Paver.

“I don’t think it’s a secret that we’re struggling a little bit with injuries so it’ll be another week where we need to get through this Premiership Cup to be honest because we need a bit of time to recoup and regenerate,” said Cattle. “But we look at this Premiership Cup period and the couple of weeks off that we want to grow as a team.”

“There’s a lot of new faces in there, it feels like we have to do another pre-season to be honest. We’re trying to keep our eye on the bigger picture but it doesn’t help when the injury list is piling up a little bit. We’ll do what’s controllable and we’ll do our best to get out of the situation.”

As Cattle knows, the Premiership Rugby Cup has brought about positives, albeit in defeat, including in their most recent display against the Chiefs, who they were able to hold at bay for at least 40 minutes at Sandy Park.

Just three points separated the two sides at the turn, but it was the Chiefs who pulled clear after the break, running in six tries, including a hat-trick for in-form winger, Paul Brown-Bampoe.

“I think there were some big performances,” added Cattle. “I just thought in that first half we had the elements and I thought we dictated field position, just didn’t convert the pressure into points.

“The boys got ripped into a little bit at half-time but it wasn’t an effort thing, it was more of an execution thing. You know against a team like Exeter if you don’t execute in that final third, you're going to come a cropper, and their pressure told in that second half.”

Ahead of the Hartpury game, the Pirates will need to assess the fitness of both Iwan Jenkins and Tomi Agbongbon, both of whom were forced off in the game with the Chiefs.