ALTHOUGH a 25-7 defeat at home to second-from-bottom Old Crossleyans seems like an opportunity missed, Carl Paterson - head coach of basement boys Bradford & Bingley - is not burying his head in his hands.

Despite losing their opening seven games in Regional Two North East, Paterson can see his team’s continual improvement and feels that their first victory since February 2019 is just around the corner.

He explained: “The way I look at it is compared to last year we are better, so we are going in the right direction and the lads are not far off from getting their first win.

“We have that 10-point deduction (from last season), which we can do nothing about, but you can see every week that a win is coming but I just want it to hurry up,

“Our hard work will pay off and we will not go down without a fight.

“They are a good set of lads too - one or two of them are daft but I like daft lads.”

What disappointed Paterson most about B&B’s 25-7 defeat was that they forgot about their gameplan for the first 45 minutes.

He revealed: “I am frustrated, really frustrated. We have worked really hard for the past two or three weeks on changing what we do and then we left it in the changing rooms for the first half.

“We have simplified what we were doing from last season but for some reason here we just didn’t start.

“We gave them too much field position, gave away too many penalties and made too many mistakes.

“We just panicked, played at a thousand miles an hour, and made handling errors that you cannot afford to.”

This was a game that Paterson and his players had earmarked as a potential win, and he added: “We have looked at five matches this season that we thought that we could get a result out of but we will get there.

“We were still in it with 20 minutes to go but we needed to score in that second half and never did. If we had turned that corner we would have put them under a lot of pressure.”

The visitors from Halifax scored 12 first-half points while evergreen 44-year-old Bees prop Roger Raper was in the sin bin, but Paterson did not feel that that was pivotal.

He said: “In the grand scheme of things, Roger’s yellow card was not that bad for us as we didn’t have a scrum in those 10 minutes, but it always hard going down to 14 men.”

As for who impressed him in a home shirt, Paterson said: “James Nicholas went really well in the back row, Ed King did a good job at No.8 and Ali Macdonald played okay at 12 when he came on.

“Luca DeVittoris did well too, but as I said, we just didn’t start for the first 40 minutes.”

When asked if exciting full-back Aidan Scully, a former Keighley Cougars player, and the Bulls’ most recent signing Dalton Desmond-Walker will feature for the Bees in the near future, Paterson said: “I hope so.

“Aidan is waiting for a result on his injured ankle and we hope that we can still get Dalton for a couple of games.

“He is good to be around for the lads but we have to get our heads down and our backsides up and work really hard anyway.

“Also we have Joe Pearson, who is a good player, coming back at 12 after a couple of weeks out, and skipper Harry Jeffrey back from his mid-season holiday.”

The Bees won three of the first four penalties awarded by referee Jamie Leahy on Saturday - a late inclusion after being freed up from fourth official duty in Sunday’s cancelled Leicester v Wasps Premiership clash - but could make nothing of them.

Even worse followed, as Raper had that 10-minute rest from the 11th minute after a high tackle on Crocs flanker Rob Oliver.

Three minutes later, a short reverse pass put much-involved lock Navheet Sembi through a gap for the visitors’ first try and then, in the 18th minute, hooker Cameron Brannan scored a pushover try that was converted by centre Josh Brown.

Three minutes after that, Bradford & Bingley got their only score, with the DeVittoris brothers, Luca and Nico, involved down the left before play switched right for centre Jack Malthouse to score.

Scrum-half Ben-Hemsley added the conversion, but the scoring for the rest of the half belonged to Crocs, with Brown adding a simple penalty in the 32nd minute, four minutes before replacement James Cooper scored a try following scrum-half Chris Vine’s quick tap penalty.

Trailing 20-7 at the interval, the Bees knew that the first score in the second half was crucial.

But it went to the visitors soon after the restart, with Brown’s kick ahead giving full-back Josh Hunt the chance to score an easy try, with the Bees’ defence drawn to the clubhouse side of the pitch, away from the danger area.

Macdonald gave the hosts some much-needed heft after he came on, while full-back Ben Bottomley knocked on close to the Crocs line as the home side looked for a consolation score.

They failed to get one though, as both sides suffered blows before the end, Brown (neck) and Hemsley (knee) both coming off injured.