No chance of giving in – Menzies

Luke Menzies

LUKE Menzies believes that team spirit within the Roughyeds camp is as good as ever despite the recent troubles on and off the field.

The latest blow to Oldham’s promotion chances came on Sunday, as York emerged from Boundary Park with three Co-operative Championship One points in the penultimate league game after turning round a 14-0 deficit to win 37-24.

Former Batley and Hull KR prop Menzies, back in the first-team picture after a fractured season in and out of the side, is at a loss to explain exactly how it was that his side lost that game after performing so well for the majority of the 80 minutes.

“The first half against York was probably the best rugby we have produced in the whole back half of the season,” said Menzies, who has made only 10 first-team appearances in 2009, partly due to picking up an ankle injury which kept him out of contention for over a month.

“Then, to be honest, it is hard to put my finger on what went wrong.

“We probably need to be more clinical in terms of where we finish our sets and where they start theirs and defensively we missed a couple of tackles.

“At the same time, if you don’t have the ball then you get tired from tackling and that is when errors start to creep in.”

The Knights defeat was a sixth loss in as many games played against the division’s top three sides.

However, Menzies does not view the latest non-result as a simple extension of the club’s recent trail of woe.

In fact, despite losing five players from the squad to Barrow a month ago and having boardroom uncertainty still hanging over the players’ heads, Menzies remains confident enough in both the squad’s morale and its skills to not rule out an appearance in a third successive play-off final in Warrington come early October.

“If you are in the play-offs then you have to believe that you can go all the way and get to the final,” he added.

“The squad we have got here still has plenty of quality in it and what we need is to bring out the self-belief to achieve what I know, deep down, we are capable of.

“Training has been going well lately. Of the five players we lost, a couple were maybe detrimental to team spirit by messing about at training and we now get more done. I don’t really feel we have lost out too much.

“These things happen and players have to look out for their own interests. There are no hard feelings and they have gone to a club at the top of the Championship, with Deaks (Barrow coach Steve Deakin) the bridge to get them across there.

“It has been difficult to get certain things out of our minds when we needed to be focused totally. The situation at board room level with (ex-chairman and majority shareholder) Bill Quinn should have been kept away from us so that we could go into games with clear minds.

“None of the boys want to be playing in Championship One next season and I say that meaning no insult to other clubs.

“You have also got to take things on yourself and it is a great personal achievement to play in a play-off final.

“As a team, we have got a brilliant stand-in captain in Tommy Goulden and a great team spirit going here.”