Beaten Batley Bulldogs on the right track insists proud Matt Diskin

Batley were beaten 34-12 by the Canadian outfit, in a game played at Hull KR’s KCOM Craven Park and are 11th in the 14-team Betfred Championship.

“I thought we made some improvements on some of the issues we’ve had in the last few weeks, regarding half-backs playing nice and square and trying to move the ball a bit and play some better rugby,” Diskin said.

“I thought we did that in patches of the game and in certain periods we did trouble them.”

Toronto are top of the table and Diskin admitted: “Going into the game the odds were massively against us. They’ve spent £1.8million, we’ve spent £180,000 so you can see the difference there before we even step on the pitch.

“You could see the quality of their personnel.

“They scored three tries on the fifth play which is sacrilege for us, lapses of concentration on the last play, but the tries they scored were really good tries, in the corner with some fantastic aerial finishes.

“There was some real quality to some of the tries they scored and sometimes you’ve just got to hold your hand up and admit they played some really good rugby.

“Our boys kept working hard for each other and they were trying to put into practice the stuff we’d been trying in training during the week.

“Some of the stuff where we thought we could expose them we did on a couple of occasions. I was really proud of the effort the boys put in.”

Diskin insisted he is confident wins will come if Bulldogs, who host Toulouse Olympique on Saturday, continue to take what they are doing in training on to the field on game day.

“For the first time this year we actually resembled some of the practice we’ve been doing,” he added. “That is big because we know we are training really well and we know when we put the stuff we are practising into games it is going to expose teams.”