Huddersfield Giants head coach Luke Robinson has hit out at his players for their “worst performance of the season” following their heavy loss against Wakefield Trinity.
Wakefield ran in eight tries to win 46-10 with the only blemish being the fact Max Jowitt missed the final kick, having gone seven from seven prior to that.
Jowitt still managed to score 18 points himself as he converted seven and grabbed a try in a brilliant performance for Wakefield, albeit they were aided by how bad Huddersfield were.
The Giants took the lead but would then concede 30 points in just eighteen minutes as they were blitzed in the first-half, leading to Huddersfield fans booing them off at the break. That would happen again at full-time and Luke Robinson seemed to understand why as he slammed the performance.
Speaking post-match to Sky Sports, he said: “That’s the worst performance of the season for me. I thought we started really well in that opening 10 or 12 minutes.
“I thought we were really dominant and then one thing sort of went against us and then that was it. The wheels fell off a little bit. That’s what I’m most disappointed at.”
Huddersfield Giants suffer “massive step back”
Elaborating on that, a frustrated Robinson said: “It’s the fact that we’ve been in games, many a game this year, where we’ve fought tooth and nail in that first half and fell away in the latter end but today, once something went against us, we just did not recover at all.
“Once they got a little bit of momentum after their first try, they just rolled us and not just through the middle, on his edges, through the middle and with their play the ball speed.
“They had a really big pack on the bench but it wasn’t just that. They just rolled us physically, not only through the middle but on his edge and we just never could sort of wrestle back momentum, which is really, really disappointing.”
Robinson also highlighted how it had been a major step back from what he thought was an ‘upward curve’ in the second half of the season, before also lamenting the club’s home form given they’ve still not won at home all year.
He said: “I’ve said all along that I thought in the second half of the season, we started picking up performances and felt like there was an upward curve in the way we were playing. Even when we weren’t picking up results, but that tonight’s a definite step back, a massive step back.”
On their home form, he explained: “This isn’t a season issue. This is probably a two or three year issue, if I’m honest. In ’22, we had a really good home record but from then, I don’t think it’s been that good. We have won games, but it hasn’t actually been that good here for quite a while.
“We’re obviously going to leave this stadium at some point. We’re going to move. Ken, the owner, has made that quite clear but while we are here, we need to try and make it a bit more fortunate and get some wins.”
Players need to find their “burning desire”
Getting those wins might be hard given they’ve got the likes of Hull FC, Catalans, St Helens, Warrington and Wakefield coming up, but Robinson conceded it’s internal issues they need to focus on and not their opponents if they’re to turn it around.
“It’s me, it’s the players, it’s the staff, it’s everybody involved,” he explained.
“We’ve all got to have a good, hard, honest conversation with each other tomorrow and find out what we actually want to get out of this this season.
“Obviously, at the beginning of the year, everybody wants to win. Everyone wants to win the Super League, wants to win the Challenge Cup. You want to win things.
“For us now, we need to find out what that burning desire is in each player and what it means to play for this great club and for the fans and for his chairman and for everybody involved. We need to find our ‘why’.”
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