Raiders ‘not good enough’ in victory

Guernsey may have scored eight tries as they beat Rochford Hundred 50-31 at Footes Lane on Saturday afternoon, but it was an afternoon littered with mistakes and Jordan Reynolds was in no mood for mincing his words afterwards.

‘If we think that’s a good enough performance from us, we ain’t going to win a Siam Cup and that’s what I’m building towards, so we’ve had a bit of a gut check on that one,’ said the Raiders director of rugby.

‘The ultimate thing that really hurt us is how on earth did we give them 30 points? Dropping 30 points to a bottom three side isn’t good enough.

‘At the end there, one of their guys went through six of our players, so you could see our guys just didn’t want to make a tackle.’

Guernsey got off to a flier, scoring inside 80 seconds, without their opponents having had a touch of the ball, but within quarter-of-an-hour they found themselves trailing by 12 as Rochford capitalised on the home side’s laxity.

The green-and-whites emphasised their superiority in the second quarter as they ran in four tries in 15 minutes and they were never in danger of losing after that, but only sporadically in the second half did they hit their straps.

‘We’ve been talking about wanting to get the performance and that’s what I’m so disappointed about,’ Reynolds said.

‘If we’re trying to get to the Siam Cup and everyone is playing for positions, we would be needing to re-think a few options. Yeah, we scored some good tries, but those were from individuals performances.

‘We should have been ruthless today and we weren’t.’

The result took Raiders to within one victory of reaching 60 points for the season, which Reynolds views as a ‘pretty good haul’, but that came as little comfort for him.

‘It’s a tough one because we’re now not counting points, we’re counting performances,’ he said.

‘Ultimately, we wanted to have four good performances before the Siam, now we’ve only got the opportunity of three, two of them are away and we haven’t had a good performance away since December, so it doesn’t leave us with much.

‘We’ve got to try and turn that around quickly. Today was a great example of what we could have done and we just did not achieve it.’

• St Jacques Vikings beat Overton 52-31 on Saturday to finish their unbeaten Counties Three Hampshire title-winning campaign with 22 straight victories