Reynolds is deflated to see his Raiders go 'flat'

Raiders managed to salvage a bonus point as a late try brought them within seven points of their visitors at Footes Lane, but this was a 28-21 victory that Old Albanians fully merited on a day when their hosts just did not really turn up, much to the chagrin of their coach.

‘We were just poor,’ said Jordan Reynolds.

‘Just bad attitude from us, to be honest. I thought we trained well for the week and the warm up was good, but we just had multiple people really off their game today and that caused us a lot of issues and just made bad decisions a lot of the time.

‘The areas where we wanted to be dominant in, especially around the tackle count, was probably at our weakest point this season.

‘I’ve just said to the boys, it’s very difficult to understand how we move this forward from where we are. Obviously, we’re very flat at the moment. Our discipline is a huge issue.

‘We’ll have a meeting next week and see if we can make amends, but the shame for us is we just weren’t there for 80 minutes today.’

The visitors got off to the better start and scored the first try of the afternoon through Charlie Fleckney before Guernsey hit back with tries from Ciaran McGann, who converted both, and Anthony Armstrong, to take the lead, but they had been pegged back to 14-14 by half-time after Ben Alexander touched down for OAs.

‘It was a case of seven penalties in a row and we just we couldn’t get into the into the game,’ Reynolds said of his team’s start.

‘Last week we had seven penalties at half time to one, the week before against Dorking we had eight penalties to two by half-time.

‘It’s our discipline and our players think it’s acceptable to then scream and yell at the referee instead of just dealing with their own game, so that’s something we have to have to deal with.’

The message at half-time was to improve that discipline and try to hold more possession, but Raiders were unable to carry out those instructions after the turnaround.

They fell behind once more when Greg Lound scored on 44min. and were then frustrated in their attempts to punch holes in the OAs defence.

The visitors held firm until, with six minutes remaining, they turned the ball over and quickly turned defence into attack through half-back pairing Bailey Thomas and Andrew Nurse, before Toby Ponsford powered over under the posts to extend the lead to 14.

Raiders gave themselves the chance of salvaging an unlikely draw when Armstrong managed to offload the ball as he was being bundled into the touch and Charlie Simmonds gathered the loose ball then scampered to the line in the 79th minute, drop kicking his own conversion to save time.

They regained possession from the restart and earned a penalty to give their supporters a glimmer of hope, but when the ball was knocked on under pressure in midfield, the game was up.

‘We had two opportunities in their 22 to score and for some reason just made the wrong option – we did a carry option, instead of a pass option,’ said Reynolds.

‘Obviously there’s a lot of frustration for us and these things that we weren’t doing last week... our option-taking was a lot better in previous weeks, so I don’t know why today it’s been off.

‘We’ll assess that and see if we can move it forward.

‘I’m a bit deflated at the moment. Hopefully we can get some reaction from the boys soon.’