The home side nearly escaped with all five points in a third-versus-fourth clash that was as close on the pitch as the National Two East table had suggested, but they were unable to hold out while down to 14 men as the visitors scored an 80th-minute try to win 29-24.
Now Guernsey will be stewing on back-to-back defeats for the next fortnight ahead of visiting National Two East pace-setters Oundle, who have seven bonus-point wins from seven, after the first bye week.
‘We were poor. It felt exactly like it did last week. We give away yellow cards every week and we expect to try and win tough games,’ said Raiders head coach Jordan Reynolds.
‘We’re at 15 penalties this week against eight. It’s just ridiculous. We talk about our discipline every week and we’re just a pen machine at the moment.
‘Talk’s cheap – we’ve just got to correct it. I don’t think we gave ourselves a good enough position to win that game the way we performed, and we’ve just got to be better.
‘Whether or not these are penalties, we’re getting pinged off the park at the moment because refs look at us because we’re showing consistency in that area. The players have all the control to control that, make sure we’re just a little bit more disciplined, and we’re just constantly getting it wrong.
‘I’ve had some bad losses here where I’ve been pretty upset and stuff like that, but that one hurts the most because we had every opportunity this week to correct those things.
‘Obviously we’re all disappointed, but I just can’t see us winning another game unless we can get rid of our yellow cards and get rid of the pen counts because it’s killing us at the moment.’
As well as their ill-discipline, Reynolds also bemoaned his side’s unforced errors, which also proved very costly.
‘I’ve just said [to the players], we’ve gone from being a top five side in the last two weeks to probably looking more like a bottom five side, and whatever’s happening at the moment – we’ve got a week off next week – we’ve got to come back and have some serious questions to ask ourselves.
‘I’d say across the board, we just got beaten by a far hungrier side, and I think that’s the disappointing thing. The energy from Esher today, we should have that. I just don’t understand why that’s gone out of us over the last couple of weeks and it’s going to be a hard pill to swallow because we’ve got another two weeks now to sit on it.’
Remarkably, both sides climbed the table after Old Albanians lost at Henley, with Raiders now third on 28 points, three points behind Esher with leaders Oundle on the maximum 35 points.
You need to be logged in to comment.