Defeat at Canterbury has a silver lining for Raiders

The home side are directly below ninth-placed Raiders in the league table, but they started the day looking anxiously over their shoulders and their 41-24 victory over Jordan Reynolds’ side will have helped ease a few relegation fears.

Guernsey’s director of rugby admitted their hosts deserved the victory while his troops were far from their best, particularly defensively.

‘It came down to a team who were pretty desperate for a win against one who have maybe got one eye on the Siam already,’ Reynolds said.

‘Defensively we missed 38 tackles on the weekend, which is our highest number for probably six or seven seasons, and that shows mentally we were just a little bit too relaxed.

‘Some of that is down to me as well – I was quite soft on them before the game, just trying something a little bit different, and that probably had an effect.’

Canterbury came flying out of the blocks and scored three tries in the first quarter of the game without reply, which gave Raiders a mountain to climb.

They made a good fist of trying to scale those heights in the second quarter, though, and scored three tries of their own before half-time through Jacob Pinkney, Anthony Armstrong and Dan Morgan.

However, by the interval the injuries were mounting up for Raiders with Dom Rice, Ciaran McGann and Luke Sayer having been replaced for various hip and hamstring problems.

Morgan also had a spell on the sidelines through injury, but he had to return to the fray later in the second half when Sam Boyland took a knock to his knee.

Those losses and another strong spell from Canterbury at the start of the second half when they scored two tries in quick succession took the game away from Raiders.

However, the visitors kept plugging away and picked up a bonus point by scoring a fourth try through Tom Ceillam late on.

Owen Thomas, who was one of Guernsey’s better performers on the day along with Hugo Culverwell according to the coach, added a couple of conversions.

‘It was a slow start from us, which was disappointing, but after that we got back into the game and scored three tries ourselves, so by half-time I thought we were in a pretty good position,’ Reynolds said.

‘But the start of the second half was similar to the first and, to be fair, things like the injuries do not help – we ended up with Mitchell [Smith] on the wing for the last 30 minutes.

‘We had already shipped three tries before the injuries, so it can’t be an excuse for that, but if there is a silver lining it is even with all that disruption our attack was still pretty good and we managed to score four tries on the road.

‘To be honest, Canterbury played well. They pulled out one of their best performances of the season.’

Raiders have a break over Easter weekend before facing Bury St Edmunds in their last home game of the season on Friday 14 April.

‘We have got a good rest and the Friday night game will help as well because it gives us eight days recovery before the next game and every day counts.

‘We will want to put in a massive shift against Burys, who are one of the form teams in the league.’