After a difficult week, where injuries and withdrawals had left Carl Forster with just 16 available players, the Whitehaven player-coach was relieved to have come away with a hard-worked 48-12 win at Oxford.

Karl Olstrom was meant to be the 17th player but his name was crossed off the team sheet having not made the trip, but Forster was unable to comment on exactly why they couldn’t travel with a full complement of players.

“It was due to a number of things,” he said.

“We’ve had a bit of in-house stuff that I can’t really comment on but we had a few injuries too.

“Tyrone Dalton was unavailable, Lewis Brown was ill and Kurt Maudling picked up an injury last week.

“We’ve had a couple of distractions but we did the job today.”

The potential banana skin that was the in-form Oxford was averted early on as Haven came storming out of the traps, scoring four tries in 12 minutes, and Forster couldn’t have been prouder of his squad.

He added: “We wanted to put a big attacking performance in and we started off like a house on fire and were 22-0 up in under 15 minutes.

“I couldn’t have asked for a better start.

“We took our foot off the gas a bit though and it was pretty frustrating. It was our best first 20 minutes of the season and our worst second 20.

“We gave Oxford a lot of field position and back-to-back sets through errors and penalties and we went away from what we were doing right.

“But we got back into our groove in the second half.”

Celebrating his 25th birthday, Forster gave himself the perfect present of a brace of tries, joining four of his team-mates who repeated the act and he was delighted with that particular stat.

“It’s always nice to cross the line but it’s more important to get the two points,” he said.

“Five players with two tries each was good to see.

“Our wingers have been a bit short on tries so we played expansively today, with forwards getting some good crash tries on the line too.

“We’ve had a good weekend.

“We came down here on Saturday and had a good training session.

“The squad’s really getting together now. There’s always improvements to work on but we’re really starting to gel.”