Featherstone Rovers boss Duffy rues missed opportunities at Toulouse

Rovers play host to holders Hull FC in a Sky-televised Ladbrokes Challenge Cup sixth round tie on Thursday evening.

That will come five days after they were beaten 36-10 at Toulouse Olympique, a result which pushed them down one place to third in the Betfred Championship.

“It’s very disappointing after a very good result last week,” reflected coach John Duffy.

“We started the game really well, but didn’t take a few opportunities in the first 15 minutes and it came round and bit us.

“We knew Toulouse were going to be a different animal this time from when we played them last time, they’ve got some players back and we just weren’t clinical enough early on.

“We had a lot of opportunities, but we got punished at the back end.”

Rovers looked on course for a precious win when they led 10-0. Duffy admitted: “We went away from our plan a bit in our good ball attack because we scored a couple of decent tries and had a lot of field position.

“We need to find out why we went off-plan. We got punished, they are a real quality team and I thought their forwards stood up.

“They were always going to after us being not so clinical with the ball. We need to watch the video and reassess because we’ve got a game coming up fast against Hull FC this week.

“We have got to learn from this as soon as possible and make sure we look after the players injury-wise.

“I think we’ve come through not too bad. We have to get ready for Thursday which is a massive game.

“We can go into that and try and turn around what’s happened today.”

Duffy added: “Mitch Clark got a real bad bang towards the end and we’ll have to have a look at him. Harry Newman got a bit of a bang on his head through an elbow in the second half, other than that I don’t think we’re too bad.

“We’ve got a really big month and we have to make sure we get our chins off the floor. We were very inconsistent and didn’t stick with our plan.”