KURT HAGGERTY believes Bradford Bulls produced their poorest performance of the season in defeat to Warrington Wolves.
Despite having led to an Ethan Ryan try just before the quarter-hour, an injury-ravaged Bulls conceded 42 unanswered points to slip to second last in the Super League table.
Though forced to field a number of players out of position, Bradford had competed well during the opening half to only trail 18-4 at the break, but after Jamie Gill’s try was disallowed for a pull on Danny Walker in the build-up, were no match for play-off chasing Wire.
“I would say it’s probably our poorest performance of the season, just purely because we ran out of steam,” coach Haggerty admitted.
“It was visible about 28 minutes into the game, we just looked so fatigued.
“We invested so much into the first half, and I couldn’t wait to get them in at half-time just to give them that 15 minutes of rest because we looked shot.
“To be honest, I didn’t expect them to go until half-time, I wasn’t sure where the game was going to go.
“Then you’ve got the disallowed (Gill) try and that’s just changed the momentum of the game for us.
“I’m disappointed today, but we’ve got to take into account the amount of players missing, the amount playing out of position and the amount of effort that was still within the game.
“We just weren’t good enough today.”
Though Loghan Lewis and Andy Ackers both passed HIAs after second-half head knocks, the Bulls’ injury list continues to grow, with playmaker Jayden Nikorima out for the remainder of the season with a pulled quad and Chris Atkin also picking up an arm injury.
“We’d prepped all week to play differently, then we lost Jayden Nikorima in the team run,” explained Haggerty.
“Now Jayden’s out for the season.
“That just threw everything off. We had Riley (Dean) having to go back into the halves because he was playing at centre, Zac (Fulton) has gone from back-row to centre, Ryan Sutton has gone from starting front-row to starting back-row.
“We completely adjusted with the amount of people we had out of position.
“I think it was a game too far.”