Chris Thorman described himself as frustrated by an unacceptable performance from Workington Town, after falling to a heavy 48-10 loss away to Newcastle Thunder.

Heading back to his home town, Thorman lamented a disastrous opening quarter, which left Workington facing an huge mountain to climb as they trailed 22-0 after just 25 minutes.

“It was very frustrating, I thought the way we started, conceding five tries in the opening 20 minutes and that left us chasing our tails for the rest of the game and your game plan goes out of the window when you are 22-0 down,” said Thorman.

“We didn’t concede for the next 20 and we got ourselves back in the arm wrestle by doing some things defensively that we had spoken about and put in to practice and we scored the first try in the second half too and we were right back in the game.

“Unfortunately, we had too many people miss their assignments today and had off days and when you’ve got four or five people who are performing at a five out of 10 or even worse, then it’s going to be tough.”

Summing up the performance of the opposition, whose win prevented Town from recording a clean-sweep of wins over the Thunder, Thorman added: “I thought Thunder were pretty good, I thought the half-backs were very good and they were very threatening when they carried the ball and they are both very quick too.

“It’s not like we didn’t talk about it though, Newman played against us for Coventry a month ago and did very similar things to us there and we hadn’t learnt our lesson.”

Looking ahead to next week’s trip to North Wales Crusaders, Thorman says that Town have some simple areas to work on and aim to reignite their tilt at the end-of-season play-offs.

“You can always turn things around and learn from your mistakes, I am probably going to look at team selection in the first instance and evaluate where I possible went wrong.”