Warrington Wolves head coach on defeat at Castleford Tigers

Having clawed back a 14-point half-time deficit against Castleford Tigers, The Wire fell to a 23-14 defeat at the Mend-A-Hose Jungle as the hosts pulled away again late on.

Here is everything Powell said post-match...

Q: How disappointing was that?

DP: What we’re doing to ourselves at the moment is crazy. You can’t put it any other way.

If you look at the first half, we make eight or nine errors, gave five penalties away, our discipline is poor, we get a bloke put in the bin – it’s pretty much a mirror image if not a little bit worse than what we did to ourselves last week.

You take a lot of energy out of yourself and some of our decision-making is beyond the pale in terms of our thinking. I don’t get what we’re thinking at the moment.

We’ve gone from being the best team in the comp to something that looks unrecognisable and there’s different reasons for that, but we’re lacking confidence at the moment and that’s one of them.

If you look at St Helens last night, they did something similar and if you do that, good luck…

I thought we did a great job of getting ourselves back into the game in the second half, but again some of our thinking is just so skewed.

We end up losing the ball first tackle from a scrum – we should have made more of the attacking positions we had even before they kicked the drop goal.

It’s hugely disappointing and we’re obviously not playing well at the moment. We’re putting ourselves under too much pressure – we nearly came back, but why are we having to do that?

Matty Ashton's second-half brace proved to be in vain (Image: SWPix.com)

Q: You said similar things a lot last year in terms of “beating yourselves” – did you beat yourselves tonight?

DP: Cas came up with a pretty tidy game against us – they took penalties and built a score.

Reading the riot act was kind of pointless because it’s not like it’s a lack of effort, more a lack of clarity.

I got asked last week what I was doing about it, but we have to start playing the ball. We can’t even keep hold of the ball in contact and that’s the biggest issue.

The amount of errors we’re making playing the ball is frightening – we’re consistently making errors in that department which is unacceptable.

Q: Is it as simple as going “back to basics?”

DP: Some of it is.

Both sides have got the same conditions but Castleford completed at 100 per cent in the first half. For us, there’s five penalties and eight errors.

Q: Did it make any difference that George Williams wasn’t playing tonight.

DP: We’ve got two players missing but they’ve got people like Paul McShane, Niall Evalds out – it’s no excuse.

We didn’t really get to train with Stef in the halves because George pulled out during the team run, so that made it difficult but it’s no excuse. The team that was out there should have been good enough to win that game.

It’s not the standards we’ve set ourselves. We’re way off them and that’s ultimately what we’ve got to get back to.

Gareth Widdop kicks the pivotal drop goal (Image: SWPix.com)

Q: Are you in freefall?

DP: I don’t think so – I just think we’ve got to sort our first halves out.

You’re talking about basic errors and if we sort them out, the whole game changes to be honest.

At the moment, we aren’t in a great place. Take where Hull were when we played them at home – they’re in a completely different place now.

That happens in teams and we need to get ourselves out of it pretty quick. There’s different ways we can do that but one of them is fixing the basic, fundamental errors we’re making.

At 14-14, I thought we were good enough to get the game done but we didn’t show enough clarity on the try line for that to happen.

Q: Do you fear James Harrison might not be available next week?

DP: I’ll have to have a look back at the tackle. It looked an awkward tackle but it’s whether it was a dangerous one.

That will get looked at and it’s nothing to do with me. We’ll see where that takes us.

Q: When you review this game, will you be thinking about making significant changes if you can?

DP: I can’t really – that’s the whole problem we’ve got at the moment.

We’ve lost a couple of players in Josh McGuire and Thomas Mikaele, Matty Nicholson is injured – we haven’t got a massive amount of manoeuvrability.

Our two half-backs were injured which has made it pretty difficult – even Leon Hayes who could have come in at half is injured.

The players who are in there have got to do a better job and find a way through the situation we’re in.

This is about what happens at the end of the season and at the minute, we’re a long way from the kind of form that’s going to get us to a Grand Final.

There are ebbs and flows in seasons that you have to negotiate and at this moment, we’re in a trough and we have to find our way back.