The Blackpool Gazette’s Andy Moore interviewed Fylde Joint Head Coach Alex Loney in mid-week. [Reproduced courtesy of the Gazette]
Fylde RFC must control their emotions and maintain composure to win more of this season’s tight games, says team boss Alex Loney.
A 27-24 defeat at Billingham stretched their winless run in National Two North to five games – a sequence that includes a draw and three matches lost by no more than three points.
Saturday’s loss in County Durham followed an injury to Matt Ashcroft, which joint-head coach Loney felt was the game’s “turning point”. He told The Gazette: ”We were in control at 24-12 and feeling good, then there is an off-the-ball incident that has got the players emotionally fuelled.
“It’s not clear on the video, and I won’t speculate on what has happened, but Matt has come off needing stitches in a head wound – but we have lost composure and given a lot of penalties away.
“We have to work on that among ourselves because you will have incidents in games you think are unfair and you have to cope with them.”
Three of those last five results have turned on points conceded by Fylde in the final moments. They have twice lost to late penalties since being pegged back by a last-minute Preston Grasshoppers try at Christmas.
Loney added: “We are playing some good stuff and no teams are outplaying us. We are just not winning, which creates frustrations, and we have to be clear in our thinking. We’ve won games late on too but we have been in a really unfortunate position recently in terms of end results. We are disappointed and are searching for improvements because we are not in the business of losing games.”
Fylde could point to a large number of absentees, with Dan Slawson making his first start at fly-half, but Loney said: “We always want everyone available but the team that took the field was good enough to win and those individuals will all back themselves. We were winning comfortably and it shouldn’t have been anywhere near a three-point game.
“We have played a lot of games without a full squad, but those are the cards you are dealt, and if you took that number of players out of the other squads in this league I don’t think they would cope so well. Dan has come through the juniors at Fylde and is a Lancashire Under-20s player. He had a good debut and I had no concerns selecting him or the rest of the team.”
This Saturday’s 3pm Woodlands match-up with a Scunthorpe team that has won twice all season will be welcome for a Fylde side in need of a victory.
Loney added: “We will hopefully have six or seven more players available and people will be thinking it’s a Fylde win, but we are in a weird situation of losing a few games and Scunthorpe have plenty of threats. They challenge you with people who can run, so if we think it’s a done deal we won’t win. We have to give this game our full attention.”