The Highlanders ended up getting a valuable lesson from a vastly superior Blues team in the opening round of Super Rugby Pacific on Saturday night.
A Blues side stacked with attacking talent feasted on Highlanders mistakes and showed all its attacking verve in a 60-20 win at Forsyth Barr Stadium.
There is no hiding from that ugly number of points conceded — it was the first time the Highlanders had coughed up as many as 60 points in 26 years — and Dermody, officially on debut as head coach, was not shirking the tough questions after the shellacking.
"We just made it tough on ourselves, to be fair," he said.
"It was ugly. We were ugly around the ball in contact, so we gave them too many goes — free shots, really, and you saw how electric their backline was.
"We just didn’t treasure the ball enough, so we were running back to a lot of things and quite often it was behind the posts.
"We’ve got to be better than that. We can’t give teams like the Blues head starts like that. It’s going to be a long year otherwise.
"The thing that hurts is they didn’t really earn a lot of those points. We were giving them easy ins, so we’ve got some work to do around our decision-making."
The Highlanders were in the game for the first 20 minutes, and dominated the final 10 minutes of the first half.
It was just the bits in between that were not flash, and whether it was pushing wild passes or kicking aimlessly back to lethal Blues counter-attackers, the home team was its worst enemy at times.
"Once we got behind, we were trying hard, but it looked like us out of shape and throwing things that weren’t on," Dermody said.
"We got back into the game with a bit more structure before halftime but just left ourselves too much to do in the second half."
A draw that has done the Highlanders no favours now has them facing the defending champion Crusaders in the Super Round in Melbourne on Friday night.
The Crusaders, too, will be hurting after a relatively heavy loss to the Chiefs on opening night.
"It’s a short week and it’s not going to get easier," Dermody said.
"It’s a matter of picking the boys up, showing them the good stuff and looking at the stuff we really need to tidy up.
"It hurts, for sure. We’ve got to try to move on but it’s got to sting a wee bit. We are at home, the crowd was in and we left ourselves too much to do."
Dermody and his crew head to Melbourne on Wednesday.
He thinks the Super Round is a worthy concept and hopes it will get plenty of support.
The Highlanders have already been affected by the injury curse.
Exciting winger Jona Nareki was a late scratching — replaced by Connor Garden-Bachop, with Argentinian rookie Martin Bogado coming on to the bench — and is facing four to six weeks on the sidelines with a stress response injury to a foot.
"It’s tough because he’s done so much work to get back," Dermody said.
"He was looking really good, but he’s a mentally tough guy and he’s pretty positive at the moment."
Star No 8 Marino Mikaele-Tu’u lasted just two minutes against the Blues before leaving the field with a rib injury.
The Hurricanes turned on the style to thump the Reds 47-13 in Brisbane on Saturday night.
Fijian Drua won the Pacific derby, beating Moana Pasifika 36-34, the Force beat the Rebels 34-27 and the Brumbies beat the Waratahs 31-25.
