TONY Smith credited the character and patience of his Warrington Wolves team as they achieved an “important” winning start to their Middle 8s campaign at the Halton Stadium.

The Wire worked at tiring out a Widnes side welcoming back seven players from injury and capitalised on that effort with four tries in 25 minutes to turn the contest on its head in the second half.

Wolves were trailing 14-6 at the 48th-minute mark but Tom Lineham’s spectacular dive into the left corner was the spark for three further tries from Dec Patton, Matty Russell and Peta Hiku to seal a fourth win against the arch enemy this year.

“I think it’s important to have got the series off to a winning start,” said Wolves’ head of coaching and rugby Tony Smith.

“Both teams showed how important it was because there wasn’t a player that went on that field that didn’t put their body on the line.

“I’ve got huge admiration for my team for the way they went about it and what they did, but I’ve got huge admiration for Widnes because they would have beaten plenty of teams in Super League on that performance.

“It was a good game, a good contest, between two teams fighting for their lives and it showed.

“I thought Widnes had a real crack at us, probably the best I've seen them play for a little while.

“They really took it to us and we had to show some character to overcome that.

“We had to show some patience as well. We came up with two or three errors in the first half that probably relieved the pressure off Widnes.

“We felt if we could eliminate a couple of those errors and put them under some pressure, go toe to toe with them, we thought we'd come home strong and that was the case.

“That takes a lot of character to do that, going toe to toe with a team that are having a real dig and playing as well as they were.

“Widnes weren't making any errors and we had to be patient to get the ball and then we came up with some real quality at the end I thought.”