Rossy focus on positives
ROSSENDALE are looking to bounce back from last weekend’s loss as they prepare for their meeting with Wirral on Saturday.
Despite a home defeat against Harrogate, Rossendale still had positives to take from last weekend’s game, and look to the rest of the season with optimism.
Head coach Mark Nelson has spoken about how the team’s own mistakes, such as two own goals and giving away a penalty, helped Harrogate make the first half of the game difficult for Rossendale.
“Basically we just gave them too much of a start,” he said. “They hadn’t really created anything, we sort of made the mistakes.”
However, despite Harrogate, who sit in second place, taking the lead the home team were able to turn their performance around.
The head coach said: “We rallied and actually won the second half 7-5, so while you know you’ve got to look at the context of the score overall obviously there was a lot of encouragement in the second half.”
Nelson now hopes that his team will take on board this encouragement and positivity as they go into this weekend’s game.
Wirral are currently sitting just one place above Rossendale,
ROSSENDALE RUFC came up short on Saturday as they suffered a home defeat against Harrogate RUFC at Marl Pits.
Despite the result Rossendale, particularly in the second half, put in a performance that against many other sides in this league would have ended
Harrogate got off to a flying start thanks to a well orchestrated kicking game from outside half Luke White, who tantalised and probed the Rossendale defence.
Harrogate were 21-0 up at the interval through tries from Luke Edwards, Danny Matthews and Jonny Van Coser, with all of them all converted by White.
Rossendale did have opportunities but the Harrogate defence at this stage proved nigh impos- sible to break down throughout the opening 40 minutes.
The home side fared much better in the second half and from a quickly taken tap penalty James Bramall found Tom Leader up in the line and with Phil Mills showing up on the inside, the full back put him in under the posts.
Lewis Allen slotted the conversion and as the game moved into its closing stages Rossendale looked the more likely to score but the interception slammed the gate shut on any possibility.
The defeat has left Rossendale in seventh position in the Northern Premier table, while Harrogate remain in second place. Rossendale do still have several games in hand on some of the teams in the division.
It was their second straight defeat, after a 31-14 loss at runaway league leaders Preston Grasshoppers earlier this month, while their sched- uled game against Billingham was postponed.
They’ll now attempt to return to winning ways on Saturday when they welcome Wirral to Marl Pits. Wirral are one place above Rossendale in the table, and a victory for Rossendale could see them leapfrog their opponents.
Wirral are in poor form and head into the match on the back of three straight defeats, having most recently suffered a 33-26 loss against Sandal at the start of the month.