Tee Ritson could be forgiven for bemoaning his luck over the past couple of weeks, with the Barrow Raiders winger having tries wrongly disallowed in each of his last two games.

However, the winger is looking a little closer to home as to why the Raiders lost their matches against Leigh Centurions and Swinton Lions, which have left them three points adrift of safety with just five games of their season left.

In both of those games, Barrow had spells where they were in the ascendency, but they were also the architects of their own downfall, with them conceding three tries either side of half-time against Leigh and they tried to force the play too much against Swinton.

Ritson said: "The last two weeks could have gone very different and we've had a few dodgy calls in the last few weeks, but I don't think we can put too much blame on the refs, to be honest.

"We haven't really been performing well over the last few weeks when it's mattered, so it's more down to the lads.

"The effort is all there, but it's just the small things and if 50-50s aren't going our way, it doesn't help, but we'll keep fighting until the end, definitely."

It could be argued that Ritson has been punished for being quick in both instances of his disallowed tries, with the one against Leigh being chalked off for a forward pass after he had burst on to Luke Cresswell's ball inside.

He was also deemed to be offside after getting on the end of Ben White's kick against Swinton, thus depriving the Raiders of drawing level at 18-18 at a crucial time at Heywood Road.

That decision was made, in error, by the touch on the far side, who was 50 metres away and such was nature of that mistake by the officials, Barrow head coach Paul Crarey actually received an apology from referee coach Steve Presley.

Ritson said: "There was a dodgy call when Cressy passed the ball to me and we watched that on video, and then obviously we've watched the one against Swinton back as well and we've all seen nothing wrong with both of them.

"Those two games could have ended very differently, but we've got to take some responsibility ourselves, as players, and just keep fighting on."

Ritson's disallowed try against the Lions came during Barrow's best spell of the game, where they tightened up their performance at a time when they had Jamie Dallimore in the sin bin and cut out the silly off-loads.

"We played the majority of the second half with 12 men - we lost Star [Amean] as well through injury once Dalli came back on.

"It was always going to be a tough ask in the second half to come back a man down, but we did manage to find some momentum and we brought that lead back. If it had been 18-18, we could have stood a really good chance."