Giants failed to rise to challenge in cup

COACH SLAMS DEFEAT AS JUST UNACCEPTABLE

HUDDERSFIELD Giants are out of the Challenge Cup following a bitterly disappointing defeat to Toronto Wolfpack on Wednesday.

The Claret and Gold went into the match at the John Smith’s Stadium on the back of an impressive Super League win over champions St Helens.

But they went down without scoring, losing 18-0, to a side who had yet to win this season.

And Giants head coach Simon Woolford couldn’t offer up any positives from the defeat – their second in two home games.

“It wasn’t great. There’s not a lot of positives that I could see on the run, he said.

“From the opening set of our D, we just didn’t have that same intent.

“We gave a penalty away and [Josh] McCrone puts the ball into the corner, we wait for it to go over the dead ball line, it doesn’t, and I just thought our start was very poor and we didn’t recover.

“Then the rain and the weather came in. It was always going to be tough, we’ve had a five-day turnaround.

“After the big performance at St Helens, it was always going to be hard with a couple of light weeks in

There won’t be a lot of positives to come out of it. We’re obviously still a long way off where

we need to be [terms of] prep, we haven’t been able to train that much, but to put in that performance, that’s not acceptable. “You can use the five-day turnaround as an excuse, but there were just some things there that are unacceptable and they’re unacceptable because we’ve set high standards and we’ve lived up to those high standards for six weeks now. We’re obviously still a long way off where we need to be.

“Like I said, there won’t be a lot of positives to come out of it.”

Giants never threatened in attack and their defence was a lot more porous than it has been for the majority of the season to date.

“With the big effort we put into Saints on Friday night, it was always going to be a battle to get the guys up,” he added.

“We had limited prep, we freshened them right up and trained pretty well, they were saying all the right things and the mood in the shed pre-game I was pretty happy with.

“The longer the game went on, the worse we got really.

“We spoke about starting the game well against a Toronto team that were probably down in confidence, we probably played them into that game.

“We forced them into playing some confident footy in the wet and to their credit they defended well but again, our attack was nowhere near where it needs to be.”