Beverland demands hard work from Ballymoney men

“We lost 42-15,” Chris told the Times. “Not having a league game for a couple of weeks affected us a bit and we seemed to have lost some of our sharpness.

“Dromore are a good side, they’re a good physical pack and we couldn’t match that physicality up front and to be honest me missed that intensity around the breakdown.

“If you don’t win that battle there then you have problems and winning the game becomes very, very difficult. We were quite weak when clearing the ball in contact as well which made it difficult for us.

“We brought in a young fellow Andrew Brown for last week’s cup game and he was in the front row for us and again Callum McDonald came up and played for us as we’re trying to bring in some of the younger lads and give them game time and experience as well.”

Ballymoney threatened the home side on ocassions, coming close to narrowing the scoreline.

“There were spells in the second half when we scored a couple of tries and we did look very dangerous,” commented Chris. “We ran Dromore all over the place at times but again we slacked off. We did give them a few scares, in particular when the score was 31-15 and we had made a break up the pitch into their 22.

“If we had finished that off it would have left it 31-22 which would have kept us very much in the game.

“At that point they turned us over, they countered us and they scored within a couple of minutes of that. That changed the last 15 minutes of the game, it would have been interesting if we had scored but it took it out of reach for us.”

The close season saw a number of changes at Kilraught’s Road leaving the coaching staff somewhat of a re-building job with a number of young players coming into the squad.

“The Twos also had a narrow defeat against Portadown Twos on Saturday so its positive that we have some great young talent coming through the ranks and the future looks really bright, its really a case of now turning the performances into results.”

Still waiting for their first win, Beverland’s men are far from down beat.

“Despite the recent results we are all together on it, we are a tight knit bunch and obviously we all want to win. We are competitive, we are going to work hard on a couple of the weak areas and will spend the weak trying to fix it, however, you can’t do it all in a short period of time.

“There were positives there, we have shown that when we do click we can scored some good tries and we looked dangerous with a couple of line breaks.

“The coaching staff will be looking at and working on the weak points from Saturday’s games.

“We are looking forward to getting on to the training pitch and sorting out the issues before we go to CIYMS on Saturday.

The guys want to win and we are working hard to get the results.”