LAST Sunday’s defeat to York Knights was a “massive eye opener”, admitted Roughyeds boss Sean Long, writes Kasey Smith.

Much like last week’s loss to Swinton, the contest was virtually done and dusted within the first forty with Oldham struggling to maintain their discipline again.

Roughyeds came to the LNER Community Stadium with a plan to get the ball out to the wings early on, but York took full advantage of their poor execution.

“It was a massive eye-opener because we weren’t disciplined with or without the ball,” said the Roughyeds boss.

“When York have players like Richie Myler and Will Dagger, they are going to pull you apart if you give them that much good ball.

“Our system is all about protecting your inside shoulder and not allowing anything through us.

“We spoke all week about Dagger, Harris and Myler and we just made it far too easy for them.”

With the Law Cup – which was scheduled to be played this Sunday – cancelled, Long now has an extra week to fix things up before the League One campaign kicks off away at Workington.

Having conceded 74 points in the last two games, the Roughyeds boss admitted a key focus area, in this coming period, will be defence.

“We’re all frustrated – as coaching staff we work hard in the week to fix things but recently things haven’t gone our way,” he explained

“The focus now will be on defence, I want to see us tackle hard, run hard and kick the ball well.

“We’re a new team coming from different systems so what we’ve had is one player doing one thing and another doing something else.

“It’s my job as head coach to make us all sing off the same hymn sheet and, at the moment, we aren’t doing that – we’re clunky.”