Victorious coach Crarey lauds ‘wonder’ of Naylor

REACH OUT . . . Gareth Owen scores Oldham’s fourth and final try with three minutes to go.

DESCRIBING his side’s 30-18 win as a “high-quality” game, Barrow boss Paul Crarey praised both teams and lauded the job Scott Naylor has done at Whitebank in a couple of seasons.

“He’s worked wonders there,” said Crarey. “I just hope we can do the same here.

“This was a full-blooded contest. I don’t know about Oldham, but that was easily our best of the season so far. The score didn’t reflect what Oldham put in or how close the battle was until we earned a bit of daylight near the end.”

Though disappointed to surrender an unbeaten league record in game six, Naylor said there would be many more evenly-contested battles like this and his side needed to learn how to manage them.

The Oldham coach said: “Barrow deserved to win because they managed the game better than we did.

“Their kicking game was better than ours and they put us under more pressure. We also gave away too many penalties.

“I can’t possibly criticise my lads as far as effort is concerned. The amount of tackling they had to do on our own try line was awesome. It was an incredible effort, but if we had managed the game better we wouldn’t have had to do all that tackling.”