How concerned are you with the form of the team right now?

It isn’t good, is it?

But all teams go through a dip at some stage. No-one maintains great form for the whole year, it just doesn’t happen.

And that’s where we find ourselves at the moment.

The difference is the sides that finish in the top four win some of their games during this period, they just don’t narrowly lose them.

Earlier in the year, there were a couple of games where we didn’t play great, but just did enough to win.

Against Salford that obviously didn’t happen, which was clearly bitterly disappointing.

So it’s vital we dig in and start turning those losses into wins again, because when you do that your confidence grows and things can quickly turn around.

What exactly did you feel went wrong against Salford?

There were clearly a number of things that were a cause for concern, but I don't think we’ve put a really good game of footy together for three or four weeks now.

We’ve definitely been down a fraction as a team and we’ve got a number of blokes who aren’t playing consistently well. They’re just playing well in patches, which happens.

And I’d have been saying this if we'd won by two points or lost by two.

Some of the tries we conceded against Salford were down to skill by the opposition, but our right edge had a tough day at the office, so we’re going to need to work hard to fix that up.

But while we know there were a number of areas where we let ourselves down, we also have to give some credit to the opposition.

With the quality of the players they have in their side they will hurt you if you let them play, and that's exactly what we did. It was no good having such a good bench as we did at the weekend if they’re going to have to spend their time when they come on having to defend, because we keep giving the opposition the ball back!

We had a number of blokes who wanted to referee the game as opposed to concentrating on doing their job right. Then people wanted to blame other people, which is something that can happen when you don't play well.

In the second half, I knew we’d score enough points to win the game. I was very comfortable about that.

But then we needed to be disciplined and defend well. We did neither.

Every time we worked hard in attack and gave them the ball back on their tryline, we were penalised, which was right. Then we couldn’t defend our line.

It was just so disappointing.

Could the news over the weekend that Kevin Brown is joining Widnes next season have contributed to the performance against Salford?

It was nothing to do with that, because we’ve known for some time internally it’s been on the cards.

And if we said it had been a factor, we’d have just been looking for excuses and not addressing the real problems.

I also don’t think it affected Kev’s performance on the day either.

He had some good points to his game, and I thought his second-half defending was very good, which I think sums us up at the moment.

We do have numbers of people who are doing some good stuff, but we’ve not got a consistent seven-out-of-10 across the board for whole halves.

It’s way too spasmodic right now, and it’s something we can’t afford to see go on for much longer.

So is it again a case of the next game not coming soon enough?

There is a bit of that, although I clearly don’t want this to become a recurring theme! We want to be talking about looking forward to playing again to keep building on good performances rather than looking to bounce back.

But, yes, as a group, we do want to get back out there at Widnes this weekend and work towards re-discovering the form that took us to the top of the table earlier in the season.

We’ve obviously had to put in a lot of hard work this week trying to right the wrongs of our performance against Salford, and this game against Widnes is clearly the acid test.

We all know how important this game has become, and we’re all determined to get back to winning ways and steady the ship.