AFTER the disappointment of the Castleford game, how much is everyone looking forward to getting back onto the field against Crusaders at the Galpharm on Sunday?

The good thing about playing in the League is that there’s always next week to try and put things right – and that’s what we’ve got the chance to do this weekend.

It goes without saying that no-one was happy with what went on at The Jungle.

But we’ve looked at a few things and feel we can make the required improvements to find the necessary response.

If you look back at our record over the past 18 months, it’s very rare we back up one poor performance with another.

We’ll take a lot of confidence from that, and intend to go out and prove that again.

We know how much the players want to get back out onto the pitch this weekend and put in a quality performance for themselves as much as anyone else.

But how strong a challenge are you expecting from the Crusaders?

They are a team capable of positing a very genuine threat.

I think they have exceeded a lot of expectations this season, and they certainly didn’t make it easy for us when we played them in Wrexham earlier this season.

We beat them 38-10 in the end, but there were times during the game when they put us under a tremendous amount of pressure.

And it’s less than a month ago they won at Leeds and beat Bradford easily.

Any side that can do that has to be respected, because that’s sign they have quality right across the board.

But, I know it’s an old cliche, this weekend is all about what we do and how we respond to what happened at Castleford the other day.

That’s what our focus this week has been all about.

So do you feel as group you’ve got over the disappointment of the performance – and result – at Castleford?

Yes, we’d like to think so, because it was very disappointing. We just didn’t play well at all.

Cas played things a little bit quicker and were a bit better than us, as the scoreline (44-18) suggested.

We obviously got off to a good start to lead 10-0 playing into the wind, but the opposition grabbed a couple of tries from kicks, with the lucky one just before half-time proving to be a bit of a killer.

But, as a whole, we were a touch off the pace, which was really disappointing, and I do still believe we paid a bit of a price for the effort we put in against Hull KR the week before.

We were forced to put in over 400 tackles that day and I think that was reflected in the performance against Castleford, who deserve a great deal of credit for the way they took full advantage of the situation.

They were very good around the ruck and they were allowed to play a bit quicker than we’d have liked.

They have some good attacking players and, unfortunately for us, when Cas play kick they are good to watch – and difficult to stop.

You mentioned Dean Widders’ fortuitous try just before half-time. But then Cas followed up with two quick tries at the start of the second half. How crucial was that period in the game?

It was massive, and scoring tries either side of half-time can make a very big difference.

The biggest thing about those scores was probably the fact we were defending the sets well – until they got to the kicks.

Generally, when we’re on our game, we defend kicks as well as any side in the competition, but on this occasion it wasn’t the case.

If you give blokes like Rangi Chase the time to kick, which you earn the right to do on the back of quick play-the-balls, it makes it a lot tougher, which we obviously found to our cost.

While Cas kicked well, how disappointed were you with your own side’s kicking game?

Unfortunately, the kicking games were like chalk and cheese.

They were at one end of the scale and we were at the other.

It was a classic example of proving why an attacking kicking game can be so effective, and hopefully we can soon get back to our best in this particular area. It’s vitally important we do.

Once again it would appear a lack of consistency is proving a major problem. Would you go along with that.

We had been putting in a few reasonable performances over the past four or five weeks, which added to the sense of disappointment we felt at the way we played on Sunday.

Yet even though it wasn’t a good performance at Castleford, we still feel as a group we’re not a million miles away, although we’re also well aware we’re not quite there yet.

Against Cas, we again paid the price for letting ourselves down in a couple of key areas, but in the past month there’s been a lot to like about the footy we’ve been playing and we’re not poles apart from the other sides.

But the top four teams in the competition are clearly going better than the next four or five sides.

The key is about getting it right on the day, and against Cas our standards simply weren’t good enough.

Fortunately, we live to fight another day, and this week has been all about getting our heads down and making sure we right the wrongs for the home game against Crusaders on Sunday.