Newcastle Intrust Super Premiership NSW coach Simon Woolford has slammed his side’s performance in their loss to Western Suburbs on Saturday, labelling the effort “not acceptable”.
Woolford’s Knights raced to a 16-0 lead midway through the first half, before errors and penalties let the Magpies back into the contest, ultimately helping them to a 34-22 victory.
“Similar to last week (a 28-all draw against Blacktown Workers) we got away to a good lead and fell into a hole. We did so well the first 25 minutes then in the second half complete eight from 15 – there’s the game won and lost,” Woolford told NSWRL.com.au.
“Obviously we’ll look at some individual errors and what we can do better as a team, but I thought we gave two or three tries away on our own line where they didn’t have to do anything – a couple of dive-overs from dummy-half, it’s just not acceptable at this level or any level. They got us a couple of times last week and a couple of times this week.
“We can talk about it until we’re blue in the face but we’ve just got to get the job done out on the field.”
While disappointed with the result, Woolford was happy with the output of some of his fresh faces and insists the future is bright at the club… if his players can learn from the opening two rounds.
“We’re a young team, we had Bobby Treacy come in, it was his first game at [Intrust Super Premiership level], Harry van Dartel, it was his first game at ISP too – those guys did really well. Brodie Jones and Sam Stone, Thomas Cronan too, they’re really young and not far out of under-20s,” Woolford said.
“We’ve just got to learn to build pressure and sustain efforts and we need to be able to put our foot on the throat when we’re in position to, because that’s two weeks in a row we’ve let teams off the hook – good leads and opportunities to go further in front but we’ve let ourselves down.
“Hopefully the experiences of the last two weeks will help them and we’ll get a win or two in the next couple of weeks and start getting a bit of confidence.”
