Richard Horne, the head coach of Doncaster RLFC, has conflicting feelings when his team defeated Sheffield Eagles 26–12 in the Betfred Championship, completing a rare double.
“They like to get off to a fast start, ambush their opponents early, and try to seize the initiative,” Horne said. However, we succeeded in doing so on Sunday, playing superb rugby and scoring several solid tries to take a 20–6 lead at halftime.
“As I say I was happy with our first half display but I was a bit frustrated with the players in the second half, as I’m sure my Sheffield counterpart will have been, because there were too many errors. I think both sides will have completed at less than 50 per cent and the game became sloppy and stop-start after a good first half.
“I don’t know what happened because we had said all the right things at half-time. But the players went out there and didn’t really do what we had talked about and we just made far too many handling errors and put ourselves under pressure.
“We were 14 points up and playing well and we didn’t need to force things. But we started pushing passes and turning over ball on the back of it and put ourselves under pressure which is not what you want to be doing against such a good team as Sheffield because they’ve shown they can post points.
“Thankfully, we played strong defence, which gave us a solid test of our line defence before Saturday week’s match against (leaders) Toulouse in the South of France. We held them out until the final few minutes.
In my opinion, he played a fantastic game against his previous team and was the man of the match. “Hooker Greg Burns was exceptional and worked tirelessly.” He’s been a fantastic addition to our team, and right now he’s playing well.
“Full-back Before I benched Craig Hall halfway through the second half, he had another strong game. He is exceptional when we are ahead and he has the ball.
We played good defence in the first half, in my opinion, and I believe there may have been some obstruction when Edene Gebbie and Connor Robinson attempted to stop a kick close to our line.
“At the time, we were ahead 14-0, and I thought we were worth the lead.”
“We’ll give the players some time off because we don’t have a game this weekend, but based on our second half performance, we need to work on our game management,” Horne stated in reference to the future.
