ROYCE Simmons didn’t mince his words following Saints’ 25-18 loss at home to Warrington on Friday night.
He paid tribute to the Wolves’ kicking and offload game whilst saying Saints may have had a “soft attitude” heading into the clash.
“I thought the opposition were just too strong for us,” he said. “They burnt us with offloads and got a lot of second phase football. Our first contact with the shoulder in defence wasn’t what we needed and sometimes we had two or three blokes in the tackle and they were still managing to offload the ball.
“They also beat us hands down with their kicking game. They continued to hit the ground with the ball and turned us around. They had us coming off our own line and backed that up with their defence too. It was a good performance by them.
“We needed a try to go into the half time break with confidence, but they kept us out. We were also a little flat after half time too.
“Perhaps we came out with a soft win last week and we might have carried a bit of soft attitude into this game. They came out of a tough win against Hull KR and they approached this game more physically.”
He continued: “Attacking wise we didn’t fare much better. Our forwards didn’t go up the field together in numbers. Our hooker won the man of the match again and if you run off him you know he will get you holes and get over the advantage line. But we ran off him one man out and we don’t need to do that anymore.
“We went to the centre of the field a lot of the time and lost some direction.
“The way we planned to do it – you saw that with Chris Flannery’s try. But that took until the 75th minute. We pushed up together and did some good things. We have a lot more to do.”
