Chester blasts referee after Johnstone incident

Chris Chester acknowledged Wakefield weren’t good enough in their 34-6 defeat to Wigan, but bemoaned the lack of action taken by referee Scott Mikalauskas against Willie Isa for his hit on Tom Johnstone.

The flying winger caught a high kick before landing, only to be hit by Isa across the face. Despite the clip being shown several times on the Sky screen, no further action was taken, something which Chester wasn’t happy about.

“Tom isn’t great at the minute, he’s a bit dazed,” Chester said.

“I thought there was something that needed to be done there and then, but it was let go and we lose a player off the back of foul play.

“The referee, however, hasn’t said it was foul play so we lose a substitution.

“I’m not sure how that hasn’t been picked up when we’ve got so many guys in the stand – it’s contact on the head and they’ve shown it three or four times on Sky.”

Chester was, however, pragmatic in realising that even if Johnstone had stayed on the field, Trinity would not have won.

“That second forty minutes just wasn’t good enough – we’ve got to defend and work harder than what we are doing.

“We didn’t match the energy that Wigan came at us with in the second-half – we played OK for 40 minutes and we certainly had enough field position to score more than what we did.

“In those situations we need calm heads and we didn’t have any tonight. Our end of sets we struggled really badly – you know you’re in a mess when you’ve got Joe Westerman and David Fifita kicking the ball.

The Wakefield boss did confirm that Johnstone will be fine for Wakefield’s trip to Catalans in the Challenge Cup.