Knights hit 50 and top six – but boss isn’t happy

9:12am Monday 12th May 2008

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YORK City Knights were today in the play-off positions in Co-operative National League Two for the first time this season after racking up a 50-point haul at Swinton.

The Knights won 50-28 at Park Lane to jump to sixth in the table, full-back Lee Mapals bagging five of their nine tries to equal the club record set by Mark Cain against Workington in 2004.

However, assistant-boss James Ratcliffe still had cause to describe the display as "disappointing".

Ratcliffe had little option but to slam a second-half performance which allowed the injury-hit Lions to comprehensively outplay his charges despite being a man down.

Swinton had seen prop Bruce Johnson sent off after only 14 minutes for a high tackle on Ross Divorty, and thereafter the Knights ran riot with seven tries in 21 minutes to effectively win the game with a 40-0 half-time lead.

But the 12-man Lions scored five tries of their own after the break, to York's two, and Ratcliffe admitted fans had seen the bad as well as the good of his Knights team. He said: "It was our second win of the season and we should be celebrating, but we're thoroughly disappointed with the performance. The second-half was not acceptable.

"It's about mental attitude. You go in at half-time thinking the game's won, but - and this is why you should never be a rugby league coach - the players then do the exact opposite to what you ask them to do.

"Why you come away from doing something which you do so well in the first half to try to make things up, which we don't do anyway, in the second half, I don't know. We put ourselves under pressure and in the end we were scratching our heads to actually stop them getting a bonus point.

"We spoke at half-time about the reasons we came so far in the first half - we were error-free, with a completion rate of 94.5 per cent.

"In the second half, we were down to 51 per cent and you're not going to win games on 51 per cent. That's when players start making things up as they go along, deciding they want to score or they don't want to play to structure or they don't really want to put their bodies in the way when it comes to tackling.

"It's a mental effort. I asked the players were they willing to take winning pay at half-time - that's not we want at York."

He added: "The supporters have come all the way over from York and I'd like to apologise for that second half.

"You've seen the good and the bad, and the bad wasn't acceptable."

"It's a big pitch at Park Lane and we scored some great tries down both flanks. We talked about the areas we wanted to exploit more, with Swinton only having 12 players, yet we decide we want to tough it out in the middle of the park. And the biggest disappointment from my point of view was our defensive effort... and that's total mental attitude, a switch-off.

"A rugby league player is a proud person and there was no way Swinton were going to come out and just make the numbers up in the second half. It was up to us to take the game to them again. We did at the start but then we just fell away."

It was nevertheless the Knights' second win - and second half-century haul - in three games and so Ratcliffe was "not too disheartened".

He said: "It's nice to be in a position where we can criticise a victory rather than criticise them when they're losing.

"It is good to come away and get a win from Swinton who are in a similar position to us, in a rebuilding stage with a young team.

"At times we looked like a side who can play at the top end of this league. For long periods of the game we looked like we could handle it. But in the second half we just imploded.

"But we've got three points away. The win has lifted us up and so we're slowly moving forward to where we want to be."