Wakefield Trinity gear up for tough Castleford Tigers test as boss stresses 'not the finished article'
Based on results, Wakefield Trinity are the form team in Super League, but coach Daryl Powell feels performances are still nowhere near what they are capable of.
Wakefield will take a four-game winning run in all competitions into tomorrow’s (Sunday) rivals round derby at Castleford Tigers, which comes a week before a huge home Challenge Cup quarter-final against Wigan Warriors. Even a perfectionist like Powell can’t be upset with that, but he insists his team can - and need to - improve.
“I think we can do things a lot better and if you can work on those things while you’re winning it really helps you,” Powell admitted. “It makes you really solid if, when you are winning games, you are still critiquing pretty hard, without going over the top with it.
“In no way are we getting ahead of ourselves thinking we are the finished article. We are just staying focused on being good from week to week. I am confident if we do that we are going to be a challenge for teams.”
Trinity withstood huge pressure at York Knights last weekend before running in two late tries to seal a precious 26-14 victory. Castleford are also on the back of a win, only their second of the season in the league, following a 40-28 result against Bradford Bulls.
“I thought Cas played really well,” Powell, who coached Tigers from 2013-21, said. “There’s loads of ways they are challenging the opposition and we are going to have to defend really well. We know we need to step up this week.”
Past results count for little in derbies and Powell added: “It’s important we get our approach right and we’ve spoken about that this week. Castleford had a good win last week and they’ll be feeling pretty confident.
“They are at home, but we are looking forward to the challenge. We are in a decent place, we can play a lot better than we are doing at the moment and we want to take steps towards that, starting with this week.”
Of areas needing improvement, the coach stressed: “I think we can defend better, which is probably ironic because we aren’t conceding a lot of points and with the ball I think there’s lots of improvement in us. In the last four games we’ve been a bit scratchy, not quite as fluent as we want to be.
“It is taking a bit of time, but we are reasonably happy with where we are at. We’ve shown a lot of character in recent weeks to win games when we’ve been under a fair bit of pressure and in general I think our second halves have been really good.”