Salford Red Devils suffered their first defeat of the 2019 Betfred Super League season against Leeds Rhinos and Ian Watson offered his thoughts on the loss.
On the result…
I think Leeds got what they deserved in the end. We failed to dominate any field position and they turned over in really good field positions and we’ve got to learn a lesson from that.
On Leeds scoring tries in quick succession…
That was because of the momentum of the game and it’s down to us to stop that momentum. I think they scored three in quick succession in the first half which got us as well. We’ve got to learn to be better at turning the momentum on its head and the only way you can do that is to defend well and we failed to do that on the back of our kick chase today.
On Jansin Turgut’s sin-bin…
I thought it was a big call. Even for the next ten minutes following the sin-bin I thought we got ourselves back into the game and we were looking really strong but after that Leeds really picked up the speed of the game and took it away from us from there. It was a big call, but it isn’t why we’ve lost.
I thought he was going for Kris Welham at first which is unlike Welham but he’s reacted in the tackle so I thought he was going to get him so then to sin-bin Jansin was a little bit of a surprise to me but James Child has said he’s sin-binned him for running it and that he’s not actually anything apparently but we’ll take a look at it on the video.
On the difference between the sides…
Yeah, there’s a massive difference in budget – that’s obvious. I wouldn’t say there was a massive difference in talent today. I think one team turned over the field position much better than the other. If you look at how many good-ball sets they had in comparison to us they turned over in good field position we were generally coming off our own try-line. We were turning the ball over on our 40m line. The more attacking sets you give a team like Leeds who have spent heavily they’re just going to put you under the pump and punish you. We didn’t control the speed of the game well.
On bouncing back against Hull KR…
We’ve got to learn our lessons. We didn’t represent ourselves in the best way against Leeds, we wanted to put up a good showing and build on the strong start to the season especially being at home and being in front of a good crowd we wanted them to see us at our best. We failed to do the hard stuff against Leeds in defending and we probably wanted to just concentrate on the defence and we need to rectify that for next weekend against Hull Kingston Rovers because they’ll pose the same threats.
Tickets are on sale for Salford Red Devils next home fixture against St Helens on Thursday 28th February. You can purchase tickets for this game at the The Salford Stadium Ticket Office, over the phone on 0161 786 1570 or online HERE. You will save money buying in advance!
