Our week of turmoil — Benson

BENSON: offstage events a big influence on play

THE off-field trauma at Oldham has had a major impact on the club’s players and staff, according to Tony Benson.

The Roughyeds coach watched his beaten-up side battle bravely against Keighley with 12 men following the dismissal of Thomas Coyle just before the half-hour mark, before ultimately losing the Boundary Park homecoming 24-22.

But the big-hearted effort arrived on the back of a bad week for the club and, despite claims made to the contrary by majority shareholder Bill Quinn — absent from the directors’ box yesterday — Benson feels that the boardroom strife has had a destabilising effect.

“It has a massive bearing on the players and the way things are going,” said Benson (pictured above) after the game.

“It is a very difficult job for the staff and the players to keep focusing on what we are doing and to be up about it.”

As for the future, Benson is simply concentrating on getting as strong a side as he can out for the next game — away to Co-operative Championship One’s runaway leaders Dewsbury Rams on Sunday.

“We now go to training on Tuesday night, patch the players up again and focus on the next game,” he added.

“We went into this match absolutely beaten up. We had nine players who could train on Tuesday and that got up to around 14 on Thursday.

“There were guys out there who should not have played but we were down on numbers and they did.

“First half, I should have replaced Paul Reilly who had a really bad ankle but he played on. He is amazing, he is playing with a badly broken nose too and still carries on, and Andy Ballard in the second half also hurt his ankle badly but had to stay on.

“It is a case of patching ourselves up and getting on with it, and hopefully everything around us will be positive as well by then.”

Another injury worry for Benson is Dave Allen, who suffered concussion during the game. The condition of all Oldham’s casualties will be checked out at training tomorrow night.

Roughyeds v Keighley report and reaction on Pages 18-19.


OLDHAM’S reserves lost 22-10 away at Keighley last week, a game in which Chris Hough was sent off for a high tackle.