Head coach Pauli Taumoepeau had no hesitation in saying his seventh-placed Eastern Suburbs outfit has been disappointing in 2019 but, with five rounds left in the regular season, he’s confident they’ve still got “more than enough firepower to do great things”.

Crucially, and uniquely, they still largely have control of their own destiny too.

The Beasties picked up an encouraging, 34-19 victory over fifth-placed Manly last weekend to stay within a victory of the top six – they’re two points adrift – and in their run home they’ll have the benefit of facing sides directly above and below them.

Easts have the bye this weekend, a timely one in Taumoepeau’s eyes, before tackling Sydney University ahead of a crucial fortnight in which they’ll face Randwick and Gordon, those two sides sit ninth and sixth respectively.

They’re still all but playing do-or-die rugby week-to-week, Taumoepeau knows that, but at the very least two of their last four games will be against sides in similar situations.

“The bye’s come at the right time, we’d just started picking up a few of those one or two-week injuries,” he said.

“We’re not having the whole week off but not having to prepare for a game does relieve some pressure and it gives us another week to look at Sydney Uni, hopefully we can all just relax and freshen up a bit.

“The win on the weekend was good, I was a little worried going in but the boys did really well and they were quick to identify the situation after the game. We sang the song and then a couple of the leaders stood up and sort of said ‘we’re not out of the woods yet’ and I’m glad that came from the playing group.

“What’s unique is that usually you’d be sitting seventh and needing other sides to lose or waiting for them to stuff up. There is an element of that but we take a little bit of comfort, and I stress a little bit, from knowing we play a couple of the sides we need to play and we do have some control.

“If Randwick beat Southern Districts this weekend our game against them [in round 16] looks like it could be a massive one.”

Things looked incredibly promising at Woollahra Oval through the pre-season and even more so after the Beasties handed reigning champions Uni a 49-28 defeat in the opening round.

After that victory there was no shortage of people suggesting Easts could be on the fast track to breaking their 50-year premiership drought, but things haven’t played out quite so well since.

“It’s definitely been disappointing, I never wanted to sit second let alone seventh,” Taumoepeau said.

“I thought we had the roster to do great things but we’ve just seemed to be missing something in a way, cohesion wise, that’s been my biggest learning curve so far this year.

“Last year, in my debut season, the biggest thing was about learning how to handle your rep players coming back in and this year it’s been that cohesion aspect.

“Even in that round one win over Uni, I was pretty quick to shut that down because I didn’t actually think we played that well. The bounce of the ball went our way some things that just never come off did, a couple of times. It wasn’t reality.

“The next three weeks, the three losses we had to Warringah (37-14), Manly (22-18) and Randwick (23-15), those games gave us more of an indication of where we were as a side, we were a little out of sync.

“There’s been times this year when we’ve walked away from games thinking ‘we just shouldn’t have lost that’ and I definitely could’ve done a few things differently so while we’ve been disappointing I think I’m to blame for quite a bit of that.

“But we’re still in it, we’ve been improving and I think if we can get a roll on in the next few weeks we’ve got more than enough firepower to do great things.”

Outside Randwick hosting Souths, in this weekend’s 14th round Gordon play West Harbour, Manly face Eastwood, Northern Suburbs take on Warringah and Sydney Uni play Western Sydney.