The Red Devils had the better of the possession and were dominant in the scrum but couldn’t capitalise on it.

“We actually had a good game but we couldn’t turn our field position into points,” Waerea said.

“We couldn’t quite hold it together to finish off some of our movements.”

He had been a bit skeptical heading into the game.

”We hadn’t trained a lot together. We had to really patch together a team on Thursday,” Waerea said.

Especially in the backline they had “probably the biggest amount of shuffles we’ve had to do”.

For all of that though, they put themselves in a position to roll the premiers.

But at that critical time the play would fall down.

“We couldn’t hold onto the ball past the fourth or fifth phase,” Waerea said.

“It was a bit disjointed.”

The loss means that mathematically the Red Devils chance of making the finals is out of their hands. They have to rely now on a few upsets.

“There were some good games, some guys that really stood up,” Waerea said.

Zac Newcombe was one of those. One of the few players they had returning he had a great game at five-eighth, scoring their lone try and picking up the three points.

“He broke through the line quite a few times or was attracting defenders and gave some nice balls to Jono Madden,” Waerea said.

He also hit some wide runners with long balls.

Brown brothers – Dan and Jeremy – were again outstanding. They “chopped everything” and stopped Pirates getting the roll on through their forwards that they thrive off.

The front row shared the one point for their dominant display.

They even a couple of times opted for scrums from penalties rather than going for the line.

It was a tough day for the Red Devils with second grade suffering a 41-12 loss and the women going down 17-nil and 48-nil.