McAvoy happy with performance, as Blues lose narrowly to Bournemouth
Newbury Blues head coach James McAvoy was pleased with his side’s quick start, despite losing to Bournemouth on Saturday.
A second minute try from Jacob Checksfield put Blues 5-0 up early on, before the visitors slowly made their way back into the contest.
Checksfield scored again in the 27th minute to bring Blues back to 10-14 following a good Bournemouth spell, but this wasn’t enough to take control of the match.
A Dan Thorne penalty kick brought the scores to 13-14, but Bournemouth responded with another try and successful conversion to seal a 21-13 win over Blues.
“The question previously was ‘are we good enough?’,” McAvoy said.
“This week we saw that we certainly are good enough.
“We were easily good enough to win that game.
“We continued with the fast start which I’ve been really impressed with, scoring in the first two minutes.
“It was pretty end to end, and it was the classic cliche of when you score, you’re most vulnerable.
“The first 25 minutes was some of the best attack we’ve seen this year, against a pretty organised side.
“We were stretching them, we had good shape.”
McAvoy was full of praise for Jacob Checksfield, following his two-try performance.
“Jacob got Man of the Match on the right-wing and finished both of his tries exceptionally well,” he said.
“It led to Bournemouth having to swap wings just so they could mark him with their stronger winger.
“It was good to make them have to adapt in that way.
McAvoy believes that Blues should have taken advantage, when Bournemouth went two men down in the second half.
“They had two men in the sin bin,” he reflected.
“Perhaps psychologically we felt it would just naturally turn into our game.
“You almost get a sense that everyones drops off and thinks ‘we’re good here now’.
“And actually they scored when they were down players. They got a real energy and a shift in momentum.
“We were left thinking, ‘that was our moment and it slipped’.
McAvoy is keen to work on how his side use the ball in future matches.
“We had the majority of possession,” he said.
“It’s up to us now to move possession into territory, because we put ourselves under pressure in the middle, but we don’t move the chain so to speak.
Newbury now find themselves second from bottom in the Regional 2 South Central, although their rather out of place points difference shows that they could quite easily be far higher up the table.
A clash against bottom placed Guildford awaits on Saturday.
“From a performance standpoint we don’t feel like this is our position.
“We’re not going to look too deeply into the table.
“That being said, this game is important. Morale is in a good place. It’s a bit of a must win.”