WAKEFIELD TRINITY are currently a club in turmoil in Super League.
Having lost all ten of their opening top flight games so far, the West Yorkshire side sit rooted to the bottom of the table having also been nilled five times in 2023.
A year ago, Willie Poching was in charge of Trinity with Francis Cummins as his assistant coach and the duo delivered Super League safety with relative ease by the end of the season.
However, neither men were kept on at Belle Vue as the club went in a different direction with Mark Applegarth and Jame Ford as number one and two.
But, Cummins believes that Poching should have been kept on longer and deserved a place at the helm after leading Wakefield to survival.
“Of course he should have been kept longer,” Cummins told League Express. “This wasn’t a rugby thing, Willie is my friend as well which pains me even more that he has gone home.
“You set out at the start of the season and while you have hopes and think you can get better, Wakefield have always been that team that needs to survive.
“If you are second bottom and you’ve achieved your spend that was the base. Willie went above that finishing tenth. There were also tough times when we started getting injuries. There is no doubt he deserved longer.
“It just appears that Willie had been making decisions about players he wanted and nothing happened and players he was letting go he didn’t get to replace them.
“It just went on too long and the writing was on the wall that they weren’t going to spend the money that they saved.”
The experience at Belle Vue was “tough”, Cummins admits.
“It was tough. I felt like we had started to turn things around a bit and then we told a few players that they wouldn’t be kept, thinking there would be opportunity to spend and that wasn’t the case.”
Cummins believes that returning to rugby league would see him come back as an assistant.
“I was assistant at Wakefield, but as a coach you are generally have a longer spell as an assistant than a head coach so I think it would be assistant first.
“Coaching is coaching, it’s using that experience to help wherever you can.”
