Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Promotion hopes in balance after home defeat
Player- coach Mal Graves admits Whitstable have left themselves with little margin for error after losing to another of their Kent 2 promotion rivals on Saturday.
The 47-29 home defeat to Foots Cray followed the previous week’s loss away to Royal Bank of Scotland and Whitstable have now slipped to fourth.
The Blues have four games remaining, starting with a re- arranged home fixture against Lordswood on Saturday (kick-off 2.30pm) and Graves says they will probably need to win them all – and claim bonus points – to stand any chance of breaking back into the top two.
They trail third-placed Foots Cray by three points and second-placed RBS by five.
Graves said: “Saturday was tough to take. We just made too many individual errors but there’s no point us going home and crying about it.
“We need to dust ourselves off and come out fighting. It’s a tight league at the top and all three of us (Whitstable, Foots Cray and RBS) have still got to play Old Gravesendians (the runaway unbeaten leaders).
“We’ve probably got to win our remaining games to be in with a chance but we’re definitely capable of scoring four tries against Old Gs and need to make sure that if the other two do slip up, we’re in a position to take advantage.”
Graves said that when his side stuck to their game plan they were more than a match for Foots Cray but all too often unforced errors set them back at square one.
He added: “We worked hard for our tries but of the seven they scored, we gave them four.
“They were big and heavy and we had a game plan to move them around, which we did, but the errors we made proved costly.
“It wasn’t any one area but a variety of things, including missing lineouts, not gathering restarts and on one occasion we ignored our exit strategy and tried to offload.
“Last week we lost to a better team but if anything this hurts more because it was a game we should have won. We only had ourselves to blame.”
Winger Bobby Powell was one of Whitstable’s star performers, scoring a hat-trick of tries.
Full-back James Garland added another, with Andy Huey kicking a penalty and three conversions to complete the scoring.
Graves said that the Blues pack also scrummaged well against much heavier opponents.