Palfrey wants to put record straight

Lewis Palfrey converts

HAVING harvested 19 points from a possible 21 since Oxford beat them 18-16 at Whitebank in April, form-team Oldham are determined to keep up the good work at Iffley Road on Sunday.

They make a first visit to the city of dreaming spires, still smarting from what Tony Benson and his gang of Roughyeds old boys did to them on a Spring day which anyone of an Oldham RL persuasion would love to erase from the calendar.

Beaten by the class of 2012, the younger class of 2013 brushed themselves down, consigned a bad result to the memory bank and went on to win six of their next seven games while climbing to second place in the table and leaving Benson’s boys in their wake.

Oldham are a significantly better team now than they were early on when they lost two of their first three Championship One games, slipping up to Rochdale and Oxford, both at Whitebank.

Back then, Lewis Palfrey looked burdened by the captaincy and was struggling to make an impact in his two key roles as team leader and chief playmaker.

Two months on, 23-year-old Palfrey (pictured, right) is playing the best rugby of his career in a young side that has become a formidable force at this level.

There are numerous reasons for the team's turn-around — not least the expertise of coaches Scott Naylor and Lee Spencer — but the way Palfrey has grown into his tasks as captain, stand-off and goalkicker, is definitely one of them.

He said: “Early on I was struggling to find form. I was thinking too much about the captaincy and about what other players were doing and not enough about what I was doing.

“Something had to change so I started to put more emphasis on my own game and once I’d got that right I just seemed to grow into the captaincy.

“We are going really well now, but I can’t forget the day Oxford beat us at Whitebank. It was a low point if ever there was one. We were all on a 100-per-cent downer.

“We definitely owe them one. We also owe ourselves one, because the way we played that day it just wasn’t us.”

for a full version of this story buy the Chronicle or read the digital edition on the eChron and iChron