Tony Smith explains why Hull FC were hammered by Huddersfield Giants

Yesterday was a terrible day for the Smith family as both Rohan Smith’s Leeds Rhinos and Tony Smith’s Hull FC were battered conceding a combined 113 points between them.

The Black and Whites were beaten by Huddersfield Giants in their final home game of the season.

After the game, Tony Smith opened up on the loss on BBC Radio Humberside.

He said: “Very, yeah, undoubtedly, yeah, embarrassed, sorry and disappointed.

“I’ve just walked out of that team room and discussing some of the performance and the combination of some of those emotions and how they can lead to performances like that.

“It’s embarrassing and I take responsibility for it as always, I just said it to them you know I’m the coach and for us to go out and put in a performance like that, I’m responsible for that.

“So I don’t like when we perform like that. I don’t mind getting beat. I’ve had plenty of that throughout my career. But just in the manner that we went in today, it wasn’t good.”

He also explained what he felt went wrong:

“I thought there was an arm wrestle that we weren’t winning at half time but we weren’t far behind. I thought we spent a lot of time in our first half down our own end and I don’t think that was all necessary.

“I just talked about it at half time, I just thought our game management and where we played the game, we weren’t controlling it well enough.

“I thought both teams weren’t particularly good in that first half. Now, they were able to lift and did, and deserved to win, and they did some good things and wore us down. That’s some of the price you pay with not controlling the game how you want to in the first half. You pay a price for it overall.

“We spent so much time defending our own line in that first half and soaking up some of that pressure and some of it we just needed to kick down the other end and put our opponents under some of that pressure.

“So I just thought we looked like a heavyweight fighter only throwing two punches in the first half. And that was about it. And, you know, we needed to throw more punches, that’s for sure.”