We gifted too many points away – Miles

Miles made his first appearance of the season – after breaking his arm at Cornish All Blacks in April, and his arrival on to the field lifted Worthing’s game.

But Raiders were already chasing the game when Miles entered the play and he said: “Loughborough played as a team and it’s a disappointing defeat. We gifted them too many points with poor defence.

“The first half performance left too much to do. It’s a different league to last year, you can’t go around missing tackles and we missed a lot of tackles in the first half. We were a bit sloppy and a bit lazy, we just let them run at us and we were on the back foot.

“It was a poor first half but even in the second half, we’ve got to realise that we need to have a bit more of a professional approach.

“It’s obviously not like last year, we’re not going to go out and win every single game and we understand that but we’ve got to realise that we can’t gift points and we can’t just gift the opposition possession.

“We let their nine (Henry Taylor) and their seven (Benjamin Pons) run circles around us, we should be smashing their guys back and slowing the ball down and we just didn’t, unfortunately. We were just too nice.”

Miles is hoping Raiders can put the result behind them, ahead of the long trip to Tynedale this weekend.

Tynedale are second-from-bottom in National 1, five points behind Worthing, and Miles said: “We’re going up on Friday night. These trips are quite nice, as much as everyone says it’s a long old trip, it gets you together as a team and there will be a lot of banter.

“And that’s the beauty of the game, we may have played badly this week but we’ve got a chance to put it right next week.”