ROUGHYEDS assistant coach Brendan Sheridan believes Sunday’s 56-4 victory over Cornwall was massive.
Confidence had been knocked in recent weeks after three losses in the last four to play-off rival sides, and the Cornwall game was seen as a potential banana skin.
Sheridan was impressed with how the team got on with the task at hand, though, after Mike Ford came in as interim head coach after Stuart Littler was let go at the start of the week.
“All teams go through a bit of a bad patch, and we’ve had some tough losses recently so it was huge to get the win in terms of our confidence,” said the Roughyeds assistant.
“The boys have been really professional to come all the way down here and get the win against a good Cornwall side who have been playing well.”
“I just felt something in the changing rooms, before we came out, that the boys were ready to go and we got the performance that we wanted.
Defensively, Oldham were strong and conceded minimal errors which helped them produce their best defensive performance since they defeated North Wales 18-4 back in March.
“We were fantastic in the first half and I thought we were really good with and without the ball,” he said.
“Defensively, our goal was to either nil them or keep them low and we kept them to just four, which was off the back of some good defence.
“They’re not the side they were last year – they’ve been playing some good rugby and they turned over North Wales last weekend – they have the calibre of players to beat teams and they were confident going into the game.
“We tried to work on getting the ball to the edges pretty quick in the week leading up to the game and we had some joy there.
“We scored on both sides of the field, which just proves how good we were with the ball.”
Photo by Cornwall Sports Media
