Proud Wakefield Trinity boss Chris Chester hails performance of young trio

A 26-23 defeat by Hull, at St Helens’ TW Stadium, left Trinity still looking for their first win since Betfred Super League resumed at the start of last month.

But it was a battling performance from an under-strength Wakefield, who gave debuts to young stand-off Connor Bailey and forward Yusuf Aydin and had another novice, Titus Gwaze, on the bench.

Trinity did not return to training, after last week’s game against Leeds Rhinos was called off due to coronavirus, until three days before the match and were without several senior players, including captain Jacob Miller.

Chester said: “I was really pleased with the debuts we gave to Connor Bailey and Yusuf Aydin.

“Both of them played really, really well. Connor was outstanding for us, I thought Yusuf showed some real good touches and Titus when he came on. It is always hard to find positives from a loss, but I thought there were quite a few positives, especially from those young kids and I thought Joe Westerman and Jay Pitts led the team really well in the absence of quite a lot of senior guys.”

Chester felt his men “had a dig and showed plenty of fighting spirit”, but had no luck.

“We’re obviously disappointed we’ve come up with another loss, we can’t forget about that,” he added.

“But what this group has had to go through over the last week has been really challenging and they gave it a really good crack.

“We had a tough call [when video official James Child overturned referee Marcus Grffiths’ decision and awarded a crucial try to Hull’s Andre Savelio], but when you are out of luck you don’t seem to get those calls.

“But I told the players after the game, considering we had a 30 or 40-minute session [on Wednesday morning] and thrown a team together, I could not be more proud of them.”

Chester admitted Trinity need to cut out the mistakes. He conceded: “We gave them nine sets in the first half through some silly errors, that hurt us and gave them field position.”

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