Clermont's Cotter sees wide open pool

Clermont went down 23-19 to the former champions at Welford Road but picked up a losing bonus point in the process.

Cotter's men slip to third in the standings after Ulster's bonus point win at Aironi but, with a trip to Italy followed by home tie with the Northern Irish province still to come, Clermont remain well-placed to win the group.

"There's two games left in this pool and we're still in it, Ulster are still in it and Leicester are still in it. It's still anyone's pool," said Cotter.

"When you look at the back-to-back games, we came out of them better than Leicester did, so that's a positive. It's going to be a tightly fought group still and it's going to be hard to finish first.

"I know this Leicester team is capable of going and getting a result in Ulster so nothing's done and dusted. And there could quite easily be two teams that qualify from this pool. There's nothing in it.

"All three teams have got lots of quality and their objectives are firmly fixed on the Heineken Cup."

Clermont led 16-7 at half time in the East Midlands but an early try in the second period cost them dear as Leicester grew in confidence and dominated territory from there on in.

Cotter, who was linked with a coaching role with the All Blacks last week, admitted his side's decision-making in the latter stages let them down but he still saw plenty of positives to take back to the Stade Marcel Michelin.

"We knew the second half would be torrid because they had the wind and they were going to try and change tactics to get down our end," added Cotter.

"Leicester are very strong up front and they've got very god variations between running and kicking and we knew we'd have to do a lot of defending. Defence was really the key word at half time. We made one error in that regard, allowing a halfback to get through and feed off to a player who scored. Suddenly the tables were turned and we were chancing the win again.

"There's a lot of a good things in our game, though. We've had some trouble exporting our performances away from home but today I thought there were things we can build on. Confidence is something we need to come away from here with even though we didn't get the win.

"The reason that we didn't get the win - when you look at it analytically - was that we didn't get out of our half well in the last 20 minutes and I don' think we controlled the end of the game very well either. That's something we will have to talk about if we want to win away in the future."