Despite losing to Castleford, has the mood been a lot more positive this week, particularly as the game against the Tigers was one you could have won?

Yes, we could have won, although we wouldn’t have deserved to.

There’s no question we tried hard and there was a lot more intent in what we were trying to do.

But we’re still not being smart enough, and that’s really hurting us.

It’s obvious our offence is hurting our defence, because against Cas our completion rate was just 60%, which is simply not good enough.

A completion rate like that means you’re handing over possession far too much and, as a result, having to defend a lot more.

That means you start doing soft things defensively and that takes things out of your offence, so it just becomes a vicious circle.

On top of that, the extra defending makes you fatigued, and the first thing that goes when you’re fatigued is your talk, and it can then become a downward spiral from there.

Is it something you believe you can fix up easily enough?

We certainly know what we need to do.

We’ve got to get back to winning some rucks and playing some calm rugby.

If we do that then we know what a difficult team we are to beat. We know that when we execute what we practice we look very good.

We’re just making things far too easy for the opposition at the moment.

It’s something we’ve been talking about in training this week, and we’ve been doing a fair bit of individual stuff so everyone is 100% clear in what we’re trying to do.

We’ve also been doing some opposed sessions and having a bit of a bash-up, and we’re encouraged by what we’ve seen on the training field so far.

 

Does the fact some of the teams above you have been slipping up and your two successive losses have prevented you from closing the gap at the top added to your sense of frustration?

This sort of scenario sums up the competition this year, doesn’t it?

Throughout this season teams have been struggling with injuries, losing a bit of form and finding their fortunes have been changing just like that.

It’s happened to every side this season and the key is how you deal with that.

That’s the process we’re going through right now.

Over the past few weeks, Jason Chan has not been featuring. What’s the reason for that?

Channy’s fit and training well, it’s purely down to selection.

We like to think we’re pretty strong in the back row, and we do feel as if we’ve got plenty of options there.

At the moment, the players who have been occupying the positions are an England international (Brett Ferres), Wales international (Larne Patrick), Tonga international (Ukuma Ta’ai) and an England Knight (Michael Lawrence).

That means we’ve got some pretty strong competition for places, and that’s the way it should be.

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