“We quit” – Huddersfield Giants boss slams ’embarrassing’ performance

Huddersfield Giants interim head coach Luke Robinson says he felt like his players “quit” on him in their 60-10 loss to Salford Red Devils.

After defeating Castleford Tigers at Magic Weekend last week, there were high hopes that Huddersfield could finish the season strong but they put in a lacklustre performance that Robinson claimed he was “embarrassed” to watch.

Salford didn’t get on the board until the tenth minute but they would donate the remaining 70 minutes, running in ten tries with Ryan Brierley scoring a hattrick, Jayden Nikorima bagging a brace and Marc Sneyd scoring a whopping 24 points.

Speaking post-game to the media, Huddersfield Giants boss Luke Robinson expressed embarrassment at the performance.

He stated: “I thought we started actually okay in that first five minutes but from that moment on for 75 minutes afterwards I was embarrassed, it was embarrassing.

“As both a player and as a coach, I thought it was really embarrassing. I felt like, I don’t think Salford were that good and when I spoke to Rowls (Paul Rowley) afterwards, I don’t think he thought they were amazing. I just thought we pretty much gave them everything.”

What went wrong for Huddersfield Giants?

With a scoreline as one-sided as 60-10, an easier question would be ‘What went right’? But for Huddersfield, next to nothing went right at all as they put in a lacklustre performance.

For Robinson, it was down to poor individual performances, as he explained: “I just think the way we were doing the individual efforts. All you’ve got to do is watch some of those contacts on an edge and some of the missed tackles.

“It wasn’t from a tactical point of view or a technical point of view, they were just literally really, really soft one-on-one misses which comes down to the individual. Unfortunately tonight we probably had five, six, seven of them which you can’t really account for.”

He accepted that it was something that had marred the club throughout the year, ultimately leading to the sacking of his predecessor Ian Watson, but Robinson claimed that it’s not something that can be fixed immediately.

“There’s been things like that throughout the year, within the group, within the club, and you’re not going to eradicate them straight away. You’re not going to eradicate them, you can put a bit of a plaster on it, which I’ve tried to do.”

Huddersfield “quit” against Salford

Continuing, Robinson noted that it was the only game other than the loss to Leeds where he felt the team had performed at such a standard.

“I think I said before when I first came in that I’ve tried to sort of bring the group back together. There was a little bit of disharmony, a bit of discontent within the group and the club, and I’ve tried my best to actually bring that together.

“I feel like over the last seven weeks, we’ve pretty much done that apart from the Leeds game but you’re not gonna you’re not going to eradicate it fully. You generally need a little bit of time or you need a little bit of pre-season but what I meant by embarrassing was although I can take losing, I can’t take losing like that.”

He even claimed that the team “quit”, stating: “I feel like we had parts of the game where I felt like we quit which is one of the most disrespectful things you could ever say to me as a player, or me as a person. I’ve never really quit. And I don’t like to be part of people, or part of organisations and teams that quit.”