Workington Town boss Chris Thorman cut a frustrated figure at full-time after seeing Town succumb to defeat at Leigh. He did however, pick out the performance of his bench players as something to take forward and paid tribute to the Centurions.

“The one positive for me was our bench, Andrew Dawson and Karl Olstrum in particular. They shored us up defensively and had a real crack for us. They haven’t played a massive amount of game time,” said Thorman.

“That was the first time that Karl has played for me. That was probably the sole positive without having watched the game back and analysed it.

“I thought that for periods of the first half, we were in the arm-wrestle, but the disappointing thing was that they didn’t have to work too hard for some of those tries. I thought we were far too passive on our line.

“We dipped our toe in the water as opposed to jumping in together defensively which is what we practice and what we have been doing collectively over the last few weeks. It’s disappointing.

“But there has to be a bit of perspective. This competition wasn’t our priority. We came up against a very good Championship team and they won’t be far off come the end of the year. They have a number of current and former Super League players right throughout. They made a couple of changes but they were far too good for us.”

He called for more consistency.

“This group of players need to learn to compete consistently for 80 minutes. You can’t just do it, regardless of the opposition sporadically for five-minute spells, ten-minute spells. I thought we did for sections of the first half but need to do it more.” Thorman said.

Next up for Workington is a long trip south to take on West Wales and Thorman was keen to refocus the group and push for victory against an improved team.

“I spoke about the opportunity before this game. I wasn’t really bothered about the win / loss, but I’m more bothered about the manner of the defeat rather than the performance.

“I stressed to them that every time you go out on that field, every time you go out to training it’s an opportunity, so don’t miss those opportunities. Today was an opportunity missed,” he said.

“We can’t afford to miss an opportunity to get better.

“We have another couple of opportunities next week to ensure a good performance on Saturday and at this stage of the season, it’s not just performance, it’s about how this group have played from day one.

“The victory is very important, in fact, it’s imperative at the moment.”