We are just not good enough yet: Woolford

SIMON Woolford claims Huddersfield Giants ‘lost their way’ in their 32-20 defeat by Warrington as the Claret and Gold suffered their third straight defeat.

The Aussie head coach is still waiting for a first win in the new Super League season having previously lost to Salford Red Devils and Catalans Dragons.

The return of Jermaine McGillvary from injury was a boost, but Huddersfield came up against an impressive Warrington side, who remain unbeaten.

However, Woolford thought the Giants were on top at one point and could have pushed on for victory before the sin-binning of Adam Walne.

“It was similar to the last couple of weeks to be honest,” said Woolford.

“There was some good stuff there, we put ourselves in a position to win the game, then we lost our way.

“I thought when Walney got ten in the bin, they were there to be beaten, I thought we were on top.

“Whether it was the right call or wrong call, we just lost our way after that.

“We had a few opportunities down their end when Walney was in the bin and we just didn’t do anything that resembled what we were trying to do and that’s the disappointing thing at the moment.

“We’re doing a lot of good things, we had some players back that certainly added to our team, but it’s the things we aren’t doing so well that is hurting us at the moment.”

At either side of half-time, Giants scored two tries through McGillvary and Matty English and looked, albeit very briefly, favourites to pick up the points.

“At 16-10 to them the game was there to be won.

“Warrington coming out of their own end at times, it looked like they were creaking a little bit, but again, we weren’t good enough to take advantage of that,” added Woolford.

“We were a man down, that doesn’t help, but it was just that 10-15 minute period again where they scored a couple of tries off our errors or kicks and all of a sudden from being six points down we were 24 down.

“It happened against Salford in round one and it happened against Catalans in round two. We were 6-6 with Catalan and half-time comes and we were 20-6 down.

“We’re just not good enough at the moment to peg those margins back.”

Friday’s game was always going to be a stern test against the early-season pace setters and Woolford admits Warrington’s kicking game was a main reason they left with the two points.

“If you have a look at Warrington, a lot of their kicks were 30/40 metres out from our try-line, they’re all attacking kicks and they put us under all sorts of pressure,” he said.

“I thought their kicking game was pretty good, you know Austin has put some kicks on for tries so we knew that, we knew they would be hard to contain.

“They roll out pretty easy, I thought we did a good job but they’re a team that offloads the ball a lot and I thought we limited their offloads quite well.”

Some positives to come out of Friday’s game were the returns of Lee Gaskell and McGillvary, while Ukuma Ta’ai was back after the visa issues that stopped him featuring in the first two rounds.

“I can’t fault the guys’ effort, there’s no doubt about that. We did a lot of good things, particularly defensively,” said Woolford.

“You know not having Gasky for three weeks, our attack is still a work in progress. I thought at times we put Warrington under a lot of pressure with our attack.

“We did some good things coming out our own end, we troubled them a few times when we did get it right in good-ball.

“There are always positives to come out of it, but I can’t be sitting here after round eight saying we weren’t quite good enough but there’s some positives to come out of it.”