Jamie Heaslip says a lack of consistency continues to hamper Connacht following Saturday night's hammering by Leinster.
The sides will meet in a Champions Cup double-header in April with the URC holders laying down a marker at the Sportsground, running in seven tries in a 45-8 win.
Andy Friend’s side had to play all but three minutes with 14 men following Tom Daly’s red card and Leinster’s class shone through after trailing 8-7 at the break.
Connacht now sit in tenth place, eight points off eighth spot with four regular season games remaining, an itinerary that includes trips to Italy and South Africa.
"It’s not going to be easy," Heaslip told RTÉ Sport.
"If they were to stop now and look back they would look at themselves and say 'we are not being consistent at all. We are not being consistent for 80 minutes in a game, we are not being consistent week on week. We can go from a high to an unbelievable low.’
"To get to the end of a long season, when you are playing in two competitions and you throw in a couple of internationals taking away your top players, it’s 11 months long, you’ve got to deliver consistency.
"You don’t have to be at 90-100% all the time but to get to the knockouts you’ve got to be 75-80% consistently."
Ahead of the 8 April meeting with Leinster in Galway, Jerry Flannery said there is obvious room for improvement.
He said: "It’s going to be really hard but there’s a couple of things they can write off. They did have a red card, they can be sharper on things like that and keep 15 players on the field.
"In the first 20 minutes they made a load of errors, missing touch, passing the ball into touch. They stopped that and they were right in the mix.
"The second half then, whether it was fatigue, we saw those errors creeping in again and it certainly won’t be good enough against Leinster."
Longer term, four current Leinster men will arrive to Connacht at the end of the season to restart their careers.
Adam Byrne, David Hawkshaw, Josh Murphy and Peter Dooley have agreed to move west to get more game time.
"It’s the strength of the school system in Leinster that they are just churning these players through," added former Munster and Ireland hooker Flannery.
"Some guys, if they are not starting the big games for Leinster, they need to go.
"I thought Peter Dooley (27) could have gone a couple of years earlier. He’s a really good signing, Byrne as well, an excellent player, Hawkshaw a really good player with the [Ireland] Under-20s."
Here's Tom Daly's early red card
— RTÉ Rugby (@RTErugby) March 26, 2022
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