Benson encouraged despite loss

Tony Benson was encouraged by Oldham’s second half display on Sunday, as they look ahead to the start of the new Championship 1 season in a fortnight.

Oldham went down 30-28 to Championship side Dewsbury, but fought back from 30-4 down with a valiant second half performance, scoring 24 unanswered points in the last 20 minutes.

He said: “Even in the first half we did a lot of reasonably good stuff, but we were disadvantaged territorially and that was mainly because we gave away a lot of penalties to a big side which made the most of their possession down the slope.

“It was difficult to hold them when defending on our goal line, but we spoke at half time about the need to play a lot more at their end of the pitch and that’s exactly what happened in the second half.

“It helped to be playing down the slope, but there was a lot more to it than that. We started to play as we know we can and that forced Dewsbury into conceding penalties which again helped us to maintain momentum.

“We know we still have a lot of work to do but I am confident we will have things sorted by the time we go to Workington in a fortnight for our first league game.”

Oldham, who lost four consecutive third tier Grand Finals, will be one of the teams battling to finish in one of the four automatic promotion spots in Championship 1 this season.