KEY POINTS:
The Chiefs camp are still talking up their chances of reaching the semifinals, even though their gruelling loss to the Blues last night failed to put them in touch with the top four.
"You guys can do the maths like me," Chiefs coach Ian Foster said last night
when asked whether their season was effectively over. "It's still all in front of us. The nice thing is with five games to play, we're playing teams in front of us... it's a tight table, not many teams are getting away. Certainly we feel destiny is in our hands."
The Chiefs now have 17 points from their eight matches, courtesy of seven bonus points thrown in with just two wins and a draw. "We've become pretty good accumulators of those," Foster said.
They are still a mathematical chance of qualifying for the semifinals but only a fool or an optimist - and the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive - would put the mortgage on them from here.
And talking of destiny, they certainly had the fate of this match in their hands but at crucial times the ball slipped through those same appendages.
"The game came down to key execution in two or three key areas," Foster said.
They can probably be summed up as the lineout and the lineout, despite the reintroduction of All Black lock Keith Robinson to the side and the belated entry of Jono Gibbes
"It was always going to be a tough battle there. They defended well but one of them at least, we could have controlled a bit better," Foster said.
The Chiefs had two lineouts from five metres out from which they should have scored but muffed both, while the Blues scored from their only similar opportunity. That was the difference in the game right there.
"We targeted their lineout as a weakness early on," Blues captain Daniel Braid said, adding that they mixed up their defensive patterns to put further doubt in the minds of the Chiefs hooker and jumpers.
It worked and there was no better example than when Greg Rawlinson stole the Chiefs ball with a single lift on the last play of the game.
Both Foster and captain Tom Willis saw positives from the match.
"I was really happy with the lift in our level. It was a tough game. There will be some very sore bodies," said Foster.
Indeed, the Chiefs were full of vigour but as much as they huffed and they puffed, they couldn't blow the Blues house down.
"A couple of the boys described it as trench warfare out there," Blues coach David Nucifora said.
That was perfect according to the coach, who now has one eye on the semifinals. His counterpart can only dream about being in the same situation.
