PLYMOUTH Albion number eight Herbie Stupple said Saturday’s performance against Esher ‘wasn’t acceptable’.
Albion lost 38-12 to the Surrey side at Brickfields. It was the first time this season they hadn’t picked up at least one point in a game.
The defeat has dropped them down to 12th in the table and Stupple says Albion have to work hard now to catch up to teams above them.
“It wasn’t acceptable in any way or form from us, especially at home,” said Stupple honestly.
“We need to be a lot better. Hopefully, it was just a blip.”
He added: “This league is funny as everyone can beat everyone and I think it was just one of those games.
“But you can’t have lapses like that. All it takes is one bad game and it pushes us back and means we have to catch up those points again.
“We still want to be pushing towards the top of the table, but we are just not quite there at the minute.”
Albion have been slow starting a number of their games this season and Stupple admitted they had hoped to avoid that problem on Saturday and reduce their penalty count, but neither happened.
“We started off poor,” he said. “Two penalties was not how we wanted to start the game – that was one thing we said we were going to try and cut down.
“The team that gets the first score sets tone and we didn’t come back in the end.
“But we can’t dwell on it. We’ve got another big game coming up this weekend against Blaydon, which is going to be a big mental task for us.
“We just have to see where our weaknesses were and work on things we need to work on this week.
“I think we gave them (Esher) too much credit. Like I said, we let them set the tone at the beginning and they did well – they did the right things, played the pitch well – and we did not react quickly enough to everything and left it too late to get the scores.”
Stupple was making his 50th league and cup appearance for Albion on Saturday. Although he could not mark the occasion with a win, he did score a try. It was his fourth in six games this season.
“Personally, I’m on a massive high at the moment,” said Stupple, who has had three years hampered by injuries. “But it’s not about me, it about the team.”