Aberdeen Grammar are in the school of hard knocks as they acclimatise to their new surroundings in National 1.
Relegation from the Premiership has hit the Rubislaw outfit hard as they have started the season slowly with last weekend’s 28-17 home defeat by Watsonian making it five straight defeats.
As the only club in the division yet to get off the mark co-head coach Greig Ryan knows the Aberdeen side have work to do.
He said: “It has been tough. When you drop down a league you might expect you will be better than the teams you are now facing but you are not.
“Due to the restructuring of the Super Six, when you look at the teams in National 1, there are some great teams with great histories there and we’ve had five of them in the first five games.
“The travelling is always tough for us but we’ve been unlucky.
“Apart from the Melrose game, which was a tough one to swallow, we seem to lose that little bit of focus in a 10-15 minute spell and are punished for it.
“Watsonian scored two tries off the back of it on Saturday and took a hold of the game as a result.
“You could say it is a mental attitude or inexperience of how to control these situations from us but we’ll learn.”
No respite as Grammar make trip to Ayr
Grammar are back on the road this weekend when they travel to Ayr.
The game at Millbrae will be the fourth away game of the campaign with all four matches coming against the top four in the division.
Ryan, however, remains optimistic his team’s fortunes will turn and insists confidence at Rubislaw has not been dented.
He said: “We have a young squad with a few old campaigners in there but it is a 15-man game and we need to get everyone on the same page and able to pull it all together.
“We just have to learn from our mistakes each week and try to work on them in training. We’ve got a good strong bunch of lads who are far from despondent.
“Ayr is a tough task and Millbrae is always a hard place to go but we’ll go there and look to be better than we were last week and see where it takes us.”
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