Head Coach Ian Watson gave his thoughts following last weekend’s 35-32 loss to Hull FC at the KCOM Stadium.
On the performance…
We showed a real fight in the second-half. We’re really embarrassed and disappointed about the first-half performance if truth be told.
We came here and didn’t have the attitude to defend. It looked like we just wanted to do the easy stuff and wanted to play the ball.
To come away to a Hull FC team who are just starting to find rhythm again and getting back to playing some kind of form, it’s not the way you go about it. We should be coming here and doing the gritty stuff and enjoying doing the gritty stuff and that’s defending.
On the defeat…
It’s individual attitudes and that’s something we need to address because we don’t have many individuals that we can keep swapping and changing the team around.
There was a lack of ruthlessness to hit somebody defensively and hurt them, we didn’t have that and that’s the first place to start as a group.
I’m proud of the group, we’re a small group but we’re a tight group.
We’re better than that and we need to address how we started in the first half because it wasn’t good enough.
You look at the second half and there was a difference in our attitude to be able to defend our goal-line and defending off of yardage but to go in the first half to nearly scoring to conceding on a seven-tackle set, it’s a lack of effort and desire.
On the in-game decisions…
We’ll see what the officials come back with, but I think the Hull crowd have played a massive part today in intimidating people.
There should’ve been other things that were picked up which weren’t.
On Rob Lui…
He’s taken a bit of a knock; he had a knee to the ribs from Josh Griffin and had a bit of a sting on his shoulder.
He put his hand up and battled through. He’s committed and it’s what you want from players and we saw that in the second half. We just wish we’d have seen that in the first-half.
On next week’s game…
Pauli Pauli was one of them who did himself justice tonight. As did Logan Tomkins when he came on. Adam Walker and Tyrone when they came on and when we moved George back into the middle, we were a lot better.
We need a response from that. We spoke about what we are as a group and that first half was not us.
The second half was more us, but we had an attitude there. It’s about being respected as a Rugby league player and as a team and in that first half we did nothing to gain any respect from anyone.
