Nathan Brown: Hard work is key to solving our problems

Jun 25 2009 by Chris Roberts, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Are you still feeling bitterly disappointed over the way things went against Castleford last Friday?

As I said at the time, we just keep coming up with the same errors on an almost weekly basis.

We came up with so many line breaks compared to the opposition, but we just kept on making poor decisions or passing to the wrong people at the wrong time.

We seem to have relatively little trouble doing the hardest part of the attack – our approach play – and it’s good we’re creating lots of chances, but we really should be taking more of them.

But even though it’s a problem we’ve been having for a fair while now, I don’t believe it’s a major problem.

I’m sure that through a combination of hard work and a touch better execution everything will fall into place. It’s something that takes time, patience and awareness.

On top of that, you were obviously very critical of the approach to the game?

Our approach to the whole game was wrong, and it started in the first five minutes when we looked to shift the ball in the back of the field on our second set of six.

That proved we were showing no respect at all to Castleford. They played well on the back of what we were failing to do and at 12-0 down we just weren’t good enough to get back into the game.

It’s been suggested to me that our performance was somewhat flat, but that had nothing to do with it, it’s just that our approach was so wrong.

When you have a completion rate of 60% it gets to the stage where it becomes unacceptable.

I’ve never wanted to be the coach of a side that has the highest completion rate in the competition, because they usually play the least footy, but it’s vital you get the balance right. At the moment, we’re not.

Were there any positives you can take from the contest?

Defensively we’re doing a pretty good job. Against Castleford, they got one try and one intercept.

In fact, our defence has been good for the past four or five weeks, although we all know we could always do better.

But, overall, we are comfortable defending, and when you analyse our last three defeats, interceptions have sealed our fate rather than major defensive frailties.

It happened at home to Salford and then in the past two weeks against Leeds and Castleford.

On all three occasions they’ve been at crucial stages of the game when we’ve been applying pressure on the opposition, but instead of making that pressure count we’ve found a way of giving our opponents an opportunity to score instead.

Unfortunately, these things happen and there’s no point dwelling on them.

What you have to do is learn quickly from this and adjust your game a touch.

David Faiumu was used very sparingly against Castleford. Was he injured or was there another reason?

Unfortunately for Foey, it was nothing to do with him.

He’s been playing very well for us, and I felt sorry for him because his limited game time was due to the position we found ourselves in during the game.