TONY Smith believes Warrington Wolves can learn from the urgency and desperation that saw Bradford Bulls fight back to beat his side 34-28 in Super League Round 11.

Wolves entered the break holding a six-point lead over their hosts, but with only Matty Russell’s try to show from the second half they slumped to a loss that lifted Bradford off the bottom of the table.

And Smith felt his side ultimately lacked the same spirit as their relegation-threatened opponents, who also bounced back from 0-16 down in the Challenge Cup last weekend to beat Catalan Dragons.

“They’re playing with a lot of spirit and got some confidence out of last week as well when they stuck together and hung in there against Catalan,” said Smith.

“They’ve built on that and that spirit, I know they’re down in troops and that’s when they tend to build together and pull together.

“We needed to do that ourselves, be a bit more clinical in some of what we did there and probably that desperation wasn’t quite there for us to the degree we needed.

“It certainly was for Bradford and it showed what you can do when you all pull together and play with that sort of urgency. We certainly need to find a bit of that ourselves in the coming weeks.

“We didn’t have that desperation or urgency that was needed. That’s disappointing but we’ll stick together and go and work hard.

“We’ll hopefully get some troops back over the next little while and even if we don’t we’ll dig in and learn some lessons about desperation and urgency and being clinical.

“We always do that, we analyse ourselves pretty harshly when it’s good and bad and we always learn lessons from the good and bad days.”

Wolves’ head of coaching and rugby said the visitors needed to open up a greater deficit when they had the opportunity and criticised their penalty count in the second half.

“I didn’t think we clocked off for the last 10 minutes,” he added. “We clocked off for the last 40 minutes in terms of intensity.

“Some of the opportunities we didn’t take, we needed to take those and get just a little bit further away from Bradford.

“We gave them enough to keep fighting and have some hope and there were a few times we could have skipped away and didn’t do that and paid the price for that.

“The second half we didn’t get going, when we had a couple of breaks we didn’t use it – there were some opportunities there for us.

“Our discipline in the second half, an eight-three penalty count, makes it tough. You’re on the back foot the whole time, we just didn’t get going that second half and Bradford had a lot of possession and certainly momentum.”