Watson still hoping for play-offs, but calls for refereeing consistency

Huddersfield narrowly lost out 23-18 to reigning champions St Helens in the Challenge Cup quarter-finals tonight, but Ian Watson hailed his players’ efforts – even if he did bemoan some refereeing decisions.

“Every game we have played we’ve had some sort of incident,” Watson said.

“Again, Josh Jones’ try, I don’t know why that’s not been checked – we’ve got the Sky cameras, let’s use them.

“At the back end of a game when a game is so tight and you get a decision like the six again in our half, there were a few that were missed for St Helens as well.

“It’s just the consistency which is frustrating; the two games against St Helens – the best side in the competition – we’ve competed and just missed out on small margins.”

Watson hopes that his players can take this close defeat into the next few weeks.

“I’m proud of the group with what we’ve done and where we’ve come from; we’ve got to use that as fuel to kick on and we’ve got to do that every single week.

“We’ve got to be like that against Hull KR and Wakefield and start expecting a minimum standard.

“If we do that then there’s no doubt at all we can be mixing it in the play-offs, but we need to perform like that week in week out.”