Wakefield Wildcats coach Richard Agar has asked his players to match their skill level with the effort they put in after watching them get on the wrong end of a 60-6 thrashing against Leeds Rhinos today.
“The first 20 minutes they had a couple of chances but we thought we were competing well enough,” said Agar.
“We talked about the quality we’d need to play with the ball when you play Leeds and we tossed up a penalty for obstruction and gave away a penalty on the first play. We didn’t kick the ball how we wanted to early doors and they had a period where they just posted tries on us far too easily.
“It’s a concern for us with how many tackles we’re winning and how many tackles we’re making. We’re not going to go too far as a team unless we can fix that up. They’re a very good team and it’s going to take a really good team to knock them out of this competition on their day. For us, we need to have a good look at ourselves and fully understand what it takes if we want to compete on this level.
“I’ve got some guys who are trying really, really hard but within that, there’s a minimum competency level on skill that we’re falling short of.
“At this stage, it’s plain to see we’ve come out of that game busted up. We ran out of interchanges and we’ve probably got seven or eight doubts from that team.
“It’s going to be a difficult one and the short turnaround isn’t going to help us in terms of trying to put it right on the training field. Hopefully we can get a reaction but that’s two weeks running where we’ve been way, way down on where we need to be to compete.”
