Neil Reynolds Remains Calm After Rylands' Heavy Defeat

Warrington Rylands suffered their heaviest defeat since stepping up to the Northern Premier League, but Neil Reynolds walked out of the dressing room on Saturday insisting this is no time for alarm.

His side were thrashed 5-0 at home by Redcar Athletic, a bruising afternoon that leaves the Blues with three defeats from their opening five games. It was also Reynolds’ first game back in the dugout after a four-match touchline ban – and he has already decided the result will not define their season.

He has seen this kind of collapse before. And he has seen the reaction.

“We just had an off day,” he told the club’s YouTube channel, stressing he had not lost his head despite the scoreline. There were no threats, no public shaming, no talk of ripping the team up.

“There's nobody in my dressing room that needs to worry about being replaced or me calling them out,” he said. “We had a horrendous off day and we all know that… as a team – staff and players – we've had a bad day at the office.”

Reynolds reached back to last season for perspective. Around February, Rylands went to Prescot and were beaten 3-0. The mood then was raw, the inquest immediate.

After that defeat, the players stayed in the dressing room. Words were exchanged – “open and honest”, as Reynolds describes them. Almost everyone who sat there at Prescot, he pointed out, was in the room again after Redcar, barring the new faces.

What followed Prescot was a surge. Rylands went on what Reynolds calls an “unbelievable run” and ended the campaign a single penalty kick away from promotion.

That memory now acts as his template.

If Rylands respond again, he believes this Redcar defeat will take on a different meaning. “If we respond positively – and that's putting a performance in at Workington on Tuesday night and then building on it against Alfreton – then we'll look back on this moment and know how it feels to be that low.

“We've got to learn from that – we've built that side and we've had an off day.”

For 45 minutes, the damage looked containable. Rylands trailed only 1-0 at the break and were still in the contest. By the midway point of the second half, the game had fallen apart. Three more goals flew in, Redcar added a late fifth, and the scoreline turned from setback to humiliation.

“It shouldn't have been that scoreline given where we were at half time,” Reynolds admitted. The frustration, he said, lay in the basics.

“Unfortunately, information that we passed on just wasn't retained. We've been beaten by an exceptional side who have come here and done a job on us.”

Now comes the wait. Three long days until Tuesday and the trip to Workington, then Alfreton after that. The schedule offers little room for sulking, and Reynolds has no interest in it anyway.