SOUTH African powerhouse Sebastian De Chaves believes London Irish must send a message to any team they could face in the Greene King IPA Championship play-offs, writes Richard Ashton.

The 26-year-old second row was part of a dominant pack which laid the foundations for Exiles’ 60-14 thrashing of Nottingham at Madejski Stadium on Sunday, a result which keeps Nick Kennedy’s men 11 points clear at the top of the table.

Irish require just three points from their remaining six games to guarantee a top-four finish, but De Chaves insists they must continue to improve in the coming weeks.

He told the Chronicle: “It’s important to lay down a marker against any team we might come across in the play-offs.

“Looking at our schedule we’ve got a lot of tough games including Yorkshire, Doncaster and Jersey away, who are very good teams. We’ve got to send a message.

“The way the play-offs are structured you have to go away from home, so if you let a team feel confident playing you at home it gives them a little edge on you, whereas if you go there and put in a good performance then their mental side takes another hit.”

He continued: “It also gives you confidence going to these places and knowing that you’ve won, it’s very comforting knowing you have what it takes to win, because if you’ve done it once you can do it again.

“Teams in the second round of fixtures and coming to the end of the season are going to step up, particularly against us because we are the best team in the Championship. We’ve got to take things game by game and continue to improve on and off the field.”

Irish ran in nine tries against Nottingham, with three coming from their dominant rolling maul – a strength De Chaves believes will be vital as the season reaches its close.

He admitted: “When Brendan (Venter, technical director) came in he brought in a very set-piece orientated game.We worked really, really hard in pre-season because in the Championship you can go to places and the conditions can be absolutely terrible and the pitch can be playing up, but we know we can go to our scrum, our line-out, our maul, and we can squeeze teams and put them under massive amounts of pressure.

“If we didn’t have that, we’d be going to places and it could be a problem.”