Hull KR may have been treble winners in 2025, but Willie Peters believes that counts for precious little this season, as he endures one of his most difficult periods as the Robins boss.
Peters will depart Craven Park at the end of the season, joining PNG Chiefs for 12 months as he prepares for their inaugural NRL season. Both he and the club would love to end the year with silverware, but as it stands they look quite the way off defending their Super League crown.
Rovers sit eight points behind Leeds Rhinos, who play later today, with Hull KR now outside the play-offs after their loss to Warrington Wolves and Leigh’s win over Hull FC.
Their 34-12 loss to Warrington saw them put in another poor performance with Peters admitting that his players are low on confidence as he explained he’s still seeking an answer to what is going wrong at the moment.
After an up and down season and a home defeat to Wakefield last week, Peters labelled the here and now as one of the most challenging periods as KR coach.
“I suppose because of where we were in terms of last year and starting off, and those types of things,” Peters said before the match, when speaking to the media this week.
“Every year has its different challenges so I’m not going to say this is number one. I mean, last year had its challenges with the back end of the year, where I think most people were sort of starting to write us off saying that we’re fading and we went to Wakefield and we had a really poor game that game.
“We had to get ourselves up. We just fell in against Warrington so (every year) has their challenges.
“That’s probably a really, really challenging period that you need to be able to get players up, believing again and you have that in every season.”
Ironically, it’s Wakefield and Warrington who they have lost to in these last two weeks to create what is perhaps the most challenging period of his Hull KR career.
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Hull KR boss makes “resilience” claim ahead of Super League run-in
KR learned last season that being resilient goes a long way to success, and the side needs to do that again now in order to overcome their current adversity.
“If people doubt you in rugby league and sport, anything in life, you need to have some sort of resilience about you,” he said during the week.
“Not many people enjoy negative things being said about you, but it’s all part of rugby league. It’s part of sport. Fans have got an opinion and rightly so, and so do media.
“For us, it’s in our four walls of where do we think we’re at? How do we think we’re going type of thing, and we’re pretty honest.”
“We know where we want to get to. We’re certainly not there yet. There’s a gap between the teams at the top at the moment compared to the next tier, so we’ve got some work to do, which we’ve got to keep working away.
“You can talk about what we’ve done in the past, but that only lasts so long… It’s important now that they look at what they can do going forward.
“All I’m worried about is literally what the players do, what they did today and what they do going forward. Nothing else matters in the past.”
That message will surely be iterated again after Saturday’s loss to Warrington and what better way for Hull KR to respond than to bounce back in next week’s derby.
