Frustration for defeated Naylor

by Ryan Booth

Oldham RLFC Head Coach Scott Naylor was aggrieved with side’s performance during Roughyeds’ 30-12 defeat to Bradford Bulls - despite producing a second-half fightback through tries from Kyran Johnson and Craig Briscoe.

“We didn’t do ourselves justice,” said Naylor.

“The first-half was just not us. We gave far too many penalties away, we had no field position in the game - when we did get a bit of field position we made a couple of clean breaks and put the ball down.

“We didn’t put any points on the board and we came in at 12-nil at half-time I thought it was pretty lucky to be only 12-nil to be honest with looking at all the defence [defensive errors] we’d done.”

After an opening period overhauled with individual errors and numerous penalty decisions, Naylor revealed the coaching staff conducted a fierce team-talk at the break in order to try and spark a Roughyeds revival.

“We had a bit of a rant and a rave at half-time and as you can see we came out into the second-half as a completely different team.

“It’s disappointing that it takes that in order to get that team to come out of the changing rooms because that was the team I was hoping would come out in the first-half - but it wasn’t.

“We got back to 18-12 and scored a perfectly good try [Paul Crook’s disallowed effort] in my opinion, but it was disallowed so I’ll have to look it on the video.

“We had all the ascendancy in that second-half and looked like the team that was going to go on and win the game and then again we slipped back into that team that was playing in the first-half.

“It frustrates the life out of me as I have a group of lads that are more than capable of winning that game and they haven’t done themselves justice. They’ve got to learn that this division is as tough as the Championship division.

“There’s a lot of good teams at the top of this division and if we want to be in the mix come the end of the season we cannot play like that and like we’ve played in recent weeks.”

Naylor revealed that the most frustrating aspect of the defeat was that many of the contributing factors were beyond his control.

He added: “I suppose that’s [individual errors] one of the most frustrating things about coaching is that you can’t do anything about it apart from making changes or trying to sort it out after the event.”

Roughyeds were denied a perfectly good try as Paul Crook’s score was chalked off due to offside and Naylor admitted some of the refereeing decisions on display were extremely questionable.

“To be honest with you I don’t think anybody had any idea what was going on in the middle," said Naylor.

"We got five straight penalties and then the referee put us on a warning which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.

“When we asked him he had no idea that he’d give us five straight penalties so I don’t think the officials helped the game.

“We scored a try that would have made it 18-all and might have gone onto win the game, I mean you never know but we can’t blame anyone else other than ourselves.

“I thought we were very hard done by, but we’ve got to be better than that against the top teams in the mix and we’ve got to learn to play the game of rugby properly.”

Oldham return to action with a home fixture against Hunslet next Sunday (April 8).