RAIDERS got back to winning ways but their head coach was left with mixed emotions after Saturday’s ultimately comfortable 49-27 win over Oxford Harlequins.

‘It was good to see our line-out back functioning and our scrum, I thought, went well,’ said Jordan Reynolds on the positives, before the reason for the bemused look on his face became clear as confusion reigned over why his side were penalised so often throughout the contest.

‘I think in all fairness, we probably could have reduced our pen count by about a third, but it was just too inconsistent between the referee and what we were doing and what they were doing, so I think that took the flow out of the game almost for both sides.

‘It’s difficult because I can turn around at our guys and say we didn’t get to build phases, but it’s pretty hard when you’re just getting penalised for some of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen.
‘But we still got 49 points and we had some good defensive sets, so it was a big improvement from where we were last week, which was great to see.’

Guernsey had wrapped up the four-try bonus point by half-time with tries from Tom Ceillam, Sam Boyland, Liam Welch and Josh Poullet as they built up a 20-point lead in the opening 40.

They started the second half strongly, too, with Anthony Armstrong scoring two tries in quick succession before the game became very stop-start.

‘You score the four tries [in the first half], do you take the foot off the gas? I don’t feel we ever did. I felt it was the pen counts that were against us that just got us flustered a lot of the time.

‘It would baffle a person that doesn’t even know anything about rugby, let alone someone who does. So we’ll have a chat with the ref and try and get our heads around it.’

Reynolds did have words of praise for two of his backline.

‘Having Dawesy [John Dawe] back in at 12 made a huge difference for us. Although he’s not long term for us – he’s still waiting for surgery – he did a really good job.

‘And Ant [Armstrong] was destructive today, wasn’t he? I think when Welchy scored that try, there was three of them left out there laying on the ground, trying to find any piece of their limbs that they could.

'I think he’s really tried to find that form again after Barnes and we kind of identified early enough that we’re just not getting him the possession because we weren’t holding possession for long enough, but he got a lot of good first and second phase ball today.’

On a day when he combined his coaching duties with that of being his team’s medic, Reynolds was also happy to report that his squad had appeared to come through unscathed.

‘I think that’s the first game in a long time where we haven’t got any injuries and having guys like Lewis [Hillier] come back, it made a big difference.

‘We’re still pretty disappointed, though.

'I think we dropped off a lot of tackles today, which we shouldn’t have, so there’s still a lot of work that we need to do.

‘But sometimes you’ve got to win those games the way we did today.’