Finnigan left frustrated by poor defence

WIDNES Vikings head coach Simon Finnigan admitted a slip in standards had been creeping in ahead of Monday’s 24-34 defeat at home to Barrow Raiders.

The Vikings chief expressed his disappointment with the performance as his side lost their first league game of the season in Round Five of the Betfred Championship.

Tries from Sam Wilde, Ste Tyrer, Lloyd Roby and Matty Fozard were undermined by a poor defensive effort from the home side and Finnigan said the squad would work to put things right ahead of their next game at York on March 20th.

“We’ll go through this game and try to fix things up because it wasn’t good enough and we need to be better against York,” he insisted. “We’ll reflect and look over it individually and then break it down as a team but it wasn’t anywhere near the performance we needed and the standards we’ve set since the start of the year.

“There had been a little bit of that creeping in anyway, we were aware of it creeping in and we should have fixed it – we haven’t and we’ve been burned. It’s really disappointing but we’ll spend the week fixing it, that’s for sure.”

Finnigan described Vikings’ defensive efforts as ‘soft’.

“The performance wasn’t good, we were outplayed in pretty much every area but particularly in defensive terms we were really poor,” he said.

“I thought we defended soft, to be honest. We didn’t show any appetite to want to keep them at their end and they just marched us down the field.

“When you defend like that you can’t get a grip of the game, even though we were 12-0 up at one stage.

“I didn’t feel we were a good 12-0 up – they scored just before half time and I felt we were never in control defensively and we got burnt.

“Because of that they scored some points – but we were poor on the night.

“We need to go away and look at that and fix it quick.”

Shane Grady limped out of the game with what appeared to be a knee injury – but

Finnigan wasn’t using that as an excuse for an under-par display.

“It didn’t look great and we’ll assess that in the week,” he said of Grady’s knock. “But that injury didn’t impact the result, we got what we deserved – we didn’t deserve to win and I’m really disappointed with that. Certainly our defensive effort was nowhere near good enough.”

There was a debut for Dec Gregory from the bench, but Finnigan admitted it was a tough night for him to showcase his ability.

“It was good to see him in Widnes colours,” he said. “But it probably wasn’t the game for him because we were so unconvincing defensively. We didn’t get to see the best of him because we didn’t want to defend.”*