DARYL Powell hopes Warrington Wolves’ international contingent will bring “a freshness” back to their club this week.

On Saturday, four Wire stars featured in England’s 18-4 win over the Combined Nations All-Stars, with George Williams scoring one of Shaun Wane’s side’s three tries.

Warrington Guardian:

George Williams touches down against the Combined Nations All-Stars. Picture by SWPix.com

Mike Cooper also donned his country’s white jersey while Daryl Clark and Peter Mata’utia were in the All-Stars starting line-up. Three more Warrington players – Matty Ashton, Stefan Ratchford and Joe Philbin – were non-playing members of the England squad.

As a result, all were absent from their club last week and as they return to The Wire, Powell hopes they come back feeling confident.

“It’s a freshen-up for them,” he said.

“An international camp is great anyway because you’re with all the best players in the competition – the standard is class and forces you to go to another level.

“All of those things will benefit them. A new environment is always going to freshen you up.

“We’re not going so well at the moment so I’d like to think the boys who have been away will bring some of that freshness back to us.

“If they bring their quality back and play their best rugby league, it’s beneficial all-round.”

Warrington Guardian:

Mike Cooper in action for England. Picture by SWPix.com

With seven players absent, Powell has worked with a reduced group since the 30-24 loss at Wakefield Trinity last time out – their fifth defeat in a row.

While the players have had some time off over the weekend, the head coach outlined how things have worked with a down-on-numbers group.

“We had a couple of sessions,” he said.

“We had the game on Sunday so we recovered from that and then trained on Wednesday and Friday.

“The boys have been good – Wednesday was a tough session, Friday was more enjoyable for the players but I think we’ve got a lot out of it.

“We need to be working hard and thinking about how we get ourselves moving forward. That’s been our focus.”

Warrington Guardian:

The defeat at Wakefield Trinity last time out was Wire's fifth in a row. Picture by SWPix.com

The international window brought about the last of several two-week pauses in quick succession having previously had breaks from fixtures as a result of their early exit from the Challenge Cup.

From now on, however, it is back to weekly fixtures until the end of the season starting with Friday’s visit of Hull FC to The Halliwell Jones Stadium.

“I don’t think it’s helped us, if I’m honest,” Powell said of the breaks.

“We’ve been in a really poor run of form – we felt like we made some real strides against St Helens but then we had a disappointing performance against Leeds.

“I don’t know how we’ve lost that game against Wakefield to be honest, but we have. The boys are nervous and are feeling a bit under pressure.

“We just need to come up with a result and a performance against Hull – result before performance but if we can play well and get a result, it’s still there for us.

“I understand all of the frustration but the guys who are feeling it the most are the players. We want to take the pressure off the boys and get them playing as well as we can.

“If we do that, we know we’ve got some high-quality players at the club and we can start winning games consistently but we need to start performing better than we are on both sides of the ball.

“Particularly defensively – we scored 24 points last week. That should be enough to win a game. We need to start doing things that are absolutely necessary to win games.”