DARYL Powell admits his Warrington Wolves side did not have enough to challenge St Helens for the duration of last night’s 28-2 defeat.

The Wire failed to score a try at the Totally Wicked Stadium and conceded five at the other end to slip to a second consecutive loss after being beaten at home by Catalans Dragons last time out.

Powell felt the first-half sin-binning of half-back George Williams was critical in turning the game in Saints’ favour after what he felt was a reasonable start from his side.

The scores were level at 2-2 when Williams was sent from the field by referee Chris Kendall for persistent offsides and while he was off the field, the hosts scored twice to take control.

Powell also felt his side “panicked” in the second half as they failed to make the most of the openings they did create.

“There were some great signs by the way we started the game,” Powell said.

“In the first half, we were in a good battle.

“The sin-binning of George Williams flipped the game a bit – we conceded a couple of tries to take it to 12-2.

“In the second half, we get an opportunity early in the second half but we make an error that is just such a poor one.

“After that, I thought we panicked. We just ended up on our line, conceded a couple of soft ones.

“It’s obviously disappointing to lose the game – with the way we started, I thought we were in with a shot but at the moment, we aren’t durable enough.”

After tries from Jack Welsby and Tommy Makinson had put Saints in control, Makinson scored his second and Mark Percival crossed straight from a scrum either side of the hour mark.

Those two tries arguably put the game beyond Wire’s reach, with Jonny Lomax rounding off the scoring with a try after a pass from dummy-half had hit Joe Bullock in the head.

“Our skill and execution was really poor and when the game was gone, we just continued to make errors,” Powell said.

“The one at the end is a terrible try to give away, that was just ridiculous.

“It’s only Round Five. We still haven’t got it yet and we need to win a game next week. We need to get back on track very quickly.

“We’ve got to put it behind us and move on. We got beat comfortably in the end but I thought there were some signs of us stepping in the right direction.

“There were some clutch moments that we didn’t get right and we couldn’t wrestle the game back.

“I thought we needed to keep Saints scoreless in the second half as they don’t concede too many points, but we just didn’t put any pressure on them.

“We didn’t do enough in the first half and we didn’t put them under any in the second.

We challenged them but we weren’t good enough to do it for 80 minutes.

“We’re still picking things up in terms of the way we want to play but it’s not happening as quick as I wanted it to happen.

“We’ve got to keep working hard to get ourselves on the right side of scorelines against teams like St Helens. There’s signs of progress for us.”