Ospreys coach Toby Booth is confident his side will be even better next season as they continue to defy the odds in the URC. An impressive 36-21 bonus point win over the Emirates Lions on Saturday has seen Booth's men climb back into the league's play-off spots with five games of the regular campaign remaining. With seven wins so far this season, the Swansea outfit have been by far the most successful of the Welsh regions, with Cardiff , Scarlets and Dragons each claiming three wins in the league to date. What has made the Ospreys ' achievements even more impressive is the amount of injuries they have suffered to key players, with the likes of Jac Morgan, Dewi Lake, Justin Tipuric, Max Nagy and Alex Cuthbert all spending extended periods on the sidelines. Then, of course, there is the financial restrictions facing all of the Welsh regions and the loss of experienced heads including Alun Wyn Jones. 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"The fabric, the core of your club and your team is really important as they’re the ones that set the tone," he said. "They're the gatekeepers of standards. Everyone talks about identification of the way they play but for me the Ospreys way they behave and the cultural elements are the most important things, because that gives you the consistency in people. "Ultimately then it’s about the engagement of what task we’re taking on. Keeping your core group together is so important and we do a lot of work in nurturing that core in many different ways. I’m pretty confident that those people are staying around. But you want to keep your core group around and you want to add to that group." He added: "The challenge with an ever-decreasing wage cap is trying to improve your squad and maintain competitiveness. By hook or by crook, we’ve held on by the skin of our teeth in relation to injury and been very, very competitive, which we’re very proud of. But we want to be competitive and also improve on competition for places and that’s a backdrop that’s very difficult to manage." To do that, Booth said that the Ospreys are looking at outside recruitment, with some new faces and promising youngsters set to join the ranks ahead of next year. While he admitted that there is a fine balancing act to be had in not introducing young players to senior rugby too soon, he's confident he can create a squad where there is less reliance on the same players, having got the Ospreys "ahead of the curve" in his time at the region so far. "I’m confident that we will have a better squad next year," he said. "I’m not saying we’re going to be more successful, but from a potential point of view, we’re excited about the youngsters we’re bringing in and we’re excited about some of the people we’re going to bring in, we’re going to recruit from outside a little bit because it creates opportunity. "What we’ve got to try to do is find a way to be less dependent on the same players. That’s very difficult because your good players are your good players. You need to blood them, ebb and flow them. You can’t just go all young, I read some of the criticism about Wales trying to go too young too early and there’s a balancing act to that. "Our core group is mid-20s now, so they’re not young anymore, even though we keep calling them young - they’re certainly younger than me!," Booth added. "From our point of view, we probably got that right and we were probably ahead of the curve because when I got here, I was going to make sure we got that core right. It wasn’t based around your Brad Davies', your Rhys Webbs, your Alun Wyn Jones’, it was understood that they were going to go soon." While the Ospreys are set to lose the experience of Nicky Smith next season, with the loosehead joining Leicester Tigers, Booth pointed to 22-year-old Garyn Phillips as a player who he is looking to incorporate into the team. Former Wales U20s star Phillips signed a new contract with the region in February and his coach says he is "excited" by his potential. Listen to the latest WalesOnline rugby podcast: "Nicky Smith is going and we’d make no bones about it, we’d love to have kept him around," said Booth. "The reasons are the reasons. But what we’re excited about is Garyn Phillips, because he’s shown a lot of potential. But we won’t know unless we put him out there alongside Sam Parry and Tom Botha. I think that’s how you grow your team, slowly and deliberately, but you are at the lap of the injury gods with the squads sizes. That’s the biggest threat to all Welsh regions, for me." With the other regions occupying three of the bottom five spots in the URC, former
London Irish, Bath and Harlequins coach Booth was quizzed on how he would have handled the Ospreys
Job had he come into the role with less experience. Opening up on his coaching philosophy, the 54-year-old admitted "it's a tough journey" and admitted he had faced "some dark stuff" during his time in Wales. "You don’t know what you don’t know," he said. "It’s a tough journey and coaching is hard. When it’s going well, the team is great and when it’s not going well, the coach is not good enough. It’s a real tough one. You've got to have a massive self-belief in what you're doing but you’ve also got to be open to the fact that you haven’t got all the answers. "I think there’s a constant checking of those elements of you as a person and how you operate. You can’t do it all yourself, you’ve got to take people with you. We’re effectively a small business with a lot of employees that require a lot of individual attention, so you’ve got to have massively aligned coaching and S&C staff to support the person at the top. Ultimately, the first bullet is going through you. Even in my time at the Ospreys, I’ve had some dark stuff that I’ve had to deal with in relation to myself, because you do take it personally," he added. "If you’re a good coach, you’re going to care and if you care you will be sensitive around certain things. That’s the resilience you require to be good at this job, the experience you’ve got to pick up and keep along the way."