“NOT acceptable”.

That is how Warrington Wolves head coach Steve Price described his side’s performance in the 22-16 home loss to Leeds Rhinos on Monday night.

He said he could see from the first set that The Wire were below-par as a sequence of six successive Super League wins came to an abrupt halt.

Price said Leeds worked harder for the win than his men.

Leeds benefitted from Warrington gifting them too much possession in the first half as they assembled a 20-6 lead that proved to be enough to win the game despite going down to 11 men in the last 10 minutes, a period in which two Josh Charnley tries produced hope of a draw being snatched.

The lack of ball control was uncharacteristic compared to recent form and Price was asked if that was down to the greasy conditions, tiredness, the ferocity of Leeds’ defence or something else?

He said: “It’s an individual responsibility to control the football.

“It’s an individual responsibility to be disciplined.

“It’s an individual responsibility to get your tackle control right and the effort areas.

“At the end of the day we’re the ones who can control it and they were better than us tonight.

“We openly admit we were clunky.

“They dominated field position but we still had an opportunity to scratch a draw near the end but we couldn’t get it done.

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“We’ve got a team that really cares about the badge. They’re hurting and I expect them to be hurting because that’s a performance that’s not acceptable.

“We were disappointing.

“You could tell in the first set where we made 30 metres, because that’s been one of our strengths.

“I think we only had one good ball set in the first half and we scored a try.

“They dominated field position. They were clearly the better team with a lot more positive actions than what we displayed.

“We came up with 19 errors, completed at 60 per cent. You’re never going to give yourself an opportunity to win a game when you’re delivering like that.

“And tackle management. Our tackle control was not up to our high standard and we deserved everything we got.”

Price was not willing to blame the performance on a tough schedule, with this being the second game in five days – or four, as it was for Leeds.

“No, that’s no excuse on our behalf. We’ve managed the training loads really well. We were fresh coming into the game so that’s no excuse,” he said.

Price pointed out he will be querying with his team why they could not pull level late on after Leeds had lost their full-back Liam Sutcliffe and stand-off Robert Lui to yellow cards.

“We certainly got in a position to get back in 22-all and we couldn’t execute that set when there was four minutes to go and they went down to 11 men, so they’re questions I need to ask,” he said.

“I’m looking for a really positive response on Sunday down in Hull KR.”

He singled out Charnley for playing tough.

“Josh carried the ball strongly and got us that try to get us back into the contest," he said.

"Toby King had some good moments.

“I thought Mike Cooper’s second stint was really good. He gave us some energy. I thought Hilly had some really good moments too.

“But right across the board, we need to be better.”