Workington Town second-rower Brett Phillips is confident his team will gel, despite Sunday's opening day defeat at home to Newcastle Thunder.

Town went down 24-20 at Derwent Park with a catalogue of errors putting them on the back foot against the visitors, but Phillips has seen enough to suggest they will come good.

He said: "We just need to keep believing.

"Obviously we're a relatively new team and we just need to keep developing with each game.

"It's going to take a little bit of time to gel.

"It doesn't excuse getting beat and everybody was gutted by the result but you've just got to give it a chance.

"I was a bit disappointed in my own performance but, when you make that many errors as a team, you're constantly on the back foot and you have to do a lot of defending.

"We need to look at what we did wrong and put it right this weekend."

Town travel to Oxford on Sunday and Phillips stressed the importance of not dwelling on the weekend's loss but taking positives out of the performance.

"We're always very positive, we've got a good group of players and coaching staff," he said.

"We've got some quality players there.

"When you look at it on paper, the squad is a very competitive one.

"We've just got to take what we can out of the game at the weekend.

"It's always good to get a win in the first game of the season but we can't dwell on missing out too much.

"I'm sure we will come good."