Mobbs-Smith hopes Maidenhead can slam the brakes on poor form

David Mobbs-Smith says Maidenhead RFC are committed to slamming the brakes on their poor run of form, with the side looking to make the most of some extra training and preparation time before they return to league action at home to Horsham on Saturday week (October 14).

On Saturday, Maids suffered their third high-scoring defeat on the spin as they crashed to a 41-30 loss to CS Stags 1863, a result that leaves Mobbs-Smith's men in the bottom three of the Regional 1 South Central Division.

In their defence, they haven’t exactly been submissive in these recent matches, notching nearly 100 points across the three games while they can count themselves a little unfortunate not to have capitalised on some late pressure in the 40-36 defeat at home to London Welsh a couple of weeks ago.

However, while they're scoring tries for fun and have racked up 30 points or more in four of their five matches, they haven't been able to close the back door while their discipline and defence has been found wanting in every game apart from their impressive 31-22 home win over Camberley.

“We were 20-10 up at half-time so it was really disappointing to lose 41-30 to the Stags at the weekend. We were the dominant force in the first half, but we just couldn’t keep up the intensity.

“They got back in the game and proceeded to dominate the second half, they outscored us.

“There were a couple of players missing but the people who replaced them are really good. We had a good side out, a great side out really.

“The Stags are a great offloading side, that’s their game. They got that going and we were struggling from that point onwards.

“We slipped up at the end, we had a chance to get two losing bonus points, but we weren’t able to do that. We just needed one more try.

“You know, in our first five games, three of them have been away. That’s not an easy start.

“It’s not like we’re playing badly, we’re just allowing our opponents to score too freely. It’s a case of ironing out a couple of issues, finding solutions to them. Some of them are decision-making, some of them are down to a lack of concentration, some of them are obviously freak errors.

“I don’t think we have to do too much before we start winning games instead of losing them. I think we play some great attacking rugby, we just can’t stop our opponents from doing likewise right now.”

Mobbs-Smith added: “Because we’re on the back foot in the league, we’re not having a rest week or anything like that. We will be training hard because we have to climb the league.

“We’ve showed some great endeavour in attack, now we’ve got to find a run of victories. We have some tough games coming up, so it won’t be easy. We’ve got to play some of the top sides in the league, but we’ve got to play those at the bottom of the league as well. The league is quite tight at the moment, we’re on 10 points and the team on top of the table is on 20-something. We will just keep persevering. We are playing the brand of rugby that will keep scoring us points and some of those games we lose will turn into wins.”

Maidenhead will go head-to-head with bottom-of-the-table Horsham next Saturday (October 14).