First half was embarassing. Neither of our centres can tackle. Oxford spotted this and consistently attacked our right edge the weaker of the two ,where we just weren't up to it!
Louis Robinson came on and upped the energy levels as he always does. This seemed to lift us a fair bit.
There seems a real lack of communication,confidence and energy.
Sencond half was a different story... Again!
Cox (a prop/ second row)was brought on at centre to shore up the right edge and that stemmed the flow down that side. He also seemed like a magnet to the loose ball, putting Macani away for one of his brace. Will cox ever get to play prop?
Pelo and Sykes worked well up the middle.
Will Lovell was handled well by the oxford defence.
Just as it looked like we were going to snatch a win and were pressuring oxford with some good D close to their line, yep we give a penalty away and with it the game!
Frustrating day out at hemel!
One of the Hemel staff hit the nail on the head when he said they look like a team of strangers!

Have to agree with that. Joe's teams have usually been well organised, but this year they have been uncoordinated both in attack and defence.

Wasn't the best performance again. Being new to skolars this season I don't have anything to compare the performances to.
Ant Cox (my son) is a forward but will play wherever he's asked to by Joe. Falling behind from the start and playing catch up RL is never going to be easy. So, sort the first 20 out and who knows!!
Watched Hemel yesterday against a very good Hunslet team.
Carbon copy of our game the day before. They fell behind by 20-odd in the first half, made a great comeback mid second half. But was never going to quite get there! Dixon was shut down every time he got the ball. The stags forwards stuck at it, but the right edge was weak, leaking tries.
Hunslet look rediculously good from 1-17 with pace and power everywhere! Going to be a tough game for our boys.

Agree with all of the above.

It might help if Skolars all trained together . The other teams ain't that special but they are drilled. Our lot look like they have never met. I watched the Same game against Oxford as we did against Oldham . At least there is some consistency.the players and coaching staff are good enough. Losing established players from last year coupled with the ins and outs this season hasn't helped .

Skolars will always have problems when some of the team live a long way outside London. Much easier to create a team if the players live in smaller singular towns like gloucester, Oxford and Hemel.

All Golds have 8 lads travelling down from the north this season, Oxford 4 or 5.

The southern based lads at Oxford live quite a distance from Oxford in some cases.
At Oxford the ultimate aim is to have a competitive team full of locals, and it is moving on the right direction thanks to the likes of Jack Briggs, but it's still a fair way off truth be told