Nathan Brown column: We have to move on

Sep 3 2009 by Chris Roberts, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Are you still feeling disappointed over the events of last Saturday?

Yes. It was just so unfortunate we couldn’t produce the performance we were after at Wembley.

As I said straight after the game, we had a fair few people who were a fair way below their best, especially in some really key areas.

But Warrington still do deserve a great deal of credit for the way they played. While we were nowhere near out best, they produced their best performance for a while.

The reality was that the occasion got to some people, but we’ve got to learn from this, move on and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

You did make a lot of handling errors, particularly in the second half. Was that because you were chasing the game?

At half-time we still felt we could win the game. We were just 18-10 behind, and if we’d have scored again early in the second half to make it 18-16 I’d have felt very confident indeed, because of the way in which we finish games.

But, just like in the first half, our attack never really got going. Chasing the game or not, that part of our game was a big disappointment.

And, defensively, we made far too many uncharacteristic errors.

We’re understandably proud of having the best defence in the competition, and normally we’re able to do a job on their key players. That, however, was not the case at Wembley.

How big a loss was Kevin Brown (he suffered a knee injury and was forced to withdraw after 30 minutes) in your bid to get back into the game?

Losing Kev obviously didn’t help.

But, to be honest, we were still playing poorly when he was out there, and good sides usually find ways to overcome hurdles such as this.

For the main, we’ve been able to do that, but not on this occasion.

Having said all that, you did seem to have some very tough calls against you?

There was definitely a knock-on in the build-up to Warrington’s first try, and Shaun Lunt was very unlucky to have his early ‘try’ disallowed for a double movement.

But, at the end of the day, we didn’t play well enough to deserve the calls to go our way.

You generally find that when you play well the calls go your way, but when you don’t play well the calls don’t.

I’d like to be able to say the officials were to blame for the defeat, but I can’t. It was down to us, that’s what we’ve got to look at.

At what stage did you feel the game was slipping away from you?

We were never going great, so we were always up against it, although Warrington never really allowed us to get going.

Even when they went 24-10 up there was still around 20 minutes to play, and we are a side that can score points, so you could always say we were in with a chance.

But, again, we just didn’t help ourselves with the way we played, and we never seriously looked like challenging that lead.

Occasions like this really can do funny things to you.