PAUL Crarey believes a lack of experience in the team showed during Barrow Raiders’ pre-season defeat to Oldham, but had no qualms over leaving players out of the side.

Skipper Martin Aspinwall, vice-captain Nathan Mossop and Dan Toal were among the familiar faces who did not feature in the Raiders’ pre-season opener due to carrying minor injuries which head coach Crarey wants them to be fully recovered from before playing.

In addition, Tom Loxam was missing due to work commitments, Tom Walker had to leave the game early to work on the nightshift, while new signing Jordan Walne and Lewis Charnock were withdrawn after doing big minutes.

And although Crarey felt Barrow lacked enthusiasm at times in the 24-10 loss to Oldham, he was not too concerned about the result and is keen to ensure those injured players are a fully fit for the Betfred Championship opener away to Batley Bulldogs.

“Sometimes, you’ve got to take winning and losing out of a friendly because we wanted to protect a lot of players, and that’s what we wanted to do to get ourselves right,” said Crarey.

“We’re in it for the long haul, not the short term. I know it’s disappointing for the fans because we lacked enthusiasm, but we didn’t give ourselves a chance to play because we never had any ball and didn’t have the experience to grab it by the scruff of the neck and say ‘let’s kick the ball well, let’s chase it well’.

“We wanted to play from everywhere and that’s probably my fault because I asked them to go out and play, no matter what the result.

“They did that, scored some nice tries and it was exciting at times, but if you’re going to throw the ball and drop it, you need to defend well and we didn’t do that.”

Even so, Crarey knows his side can improve in some areas for this Sunday’s visit of Whitehaven, being concerned with the number of handling errors in the second half and some missed one-on-one tackles which led to Oldham scoring tries.

“We’ll do a review and there is a lot to work on and review, and tidy up, for us” said Crarey. “Our completion rates were really low and at the start of the first half, we were at 100 per cent for the first eight sets and looked really comfortable.

“Then we started playing lateral and went forward hard, put little plays around the rucks and got them, but we went away from that and it’s something you can’t do. Our style is not to go punch, punch, punch and not play, and when we should have played we didn’t and when we shouldn’t have we did.”