Yorkshire Carnegie: Ryan reaches landmark with warning for team

The bullocking No8 becomes only the ninth player in the club’s history to reach a ton of league games when he lines up against Cornish Pirates in the Championship at Headingley.

He follows some illustrious and legendary names such as Mike Shelley, Tom Palmer and Rob Rawlinson who all featured with the club, at various points, in the Premiership.

However, last weekend’s 22-20 defeat at London Scottish was a sixth league defeat of the season and sees Carnegie drop to fourth, leaving more question marks about whether Bryan Redpath’s talented squad have the right mentality to go on and finally earn promotion.

“Looking around the squad it’s probably the strongest I’ve been involved in here,” said Burrows, who joined from Rotherham Titans in 2011.

“But it’s frustrating as you look around the room and see massive experience in people like Dean Schofield, Chris Jones and Rob O’Donnell who have all played top flight rugby.

“We’ve Kev Sinfield, with all his knowledge in rugby league, who’s improving week in week out and playing some good stuff, yet we are massively under-achieving for what we’ve got.

“We know that all we can do is go out this weekend and put it right.”

Asked if they put too much pressure on themselves, Burrows countered: “I don’t think we’re harsh enough at times.

“I think we’ve papered over a lot of cracks, maybe overlooked things and maybe we need to be a little more critical of each other. That’s not been negative or anything but for the benefit of the team we probably need to do it more to get better.

“There should be more finger pointing in a constructive way but, of course, I do believe we have the characters to get this job done.”

Redpath has made three changes to the side that lost in the last second at Scottish, two of which are enforced.

Taylor Prell is away with the England Under-20s team so is replaced by David Doherty whilst Sinfield has been ruled out with a calf injury.

The other change sees former Cornish star Mike Myerscough start in the second-row with Schofield amongst the replacements.

Given Max Green, Josh Bainbridge and Jack Walker are also away on England Under 20s duty, there are a number of changes to the bench.

Lewis Boyce, the fifth Yorkshire Carnegie player in the England Under-20s squad, is set to make his Carnegie return having been out for a year through injury.

He played for Harrogate last weekend and is now back in contention for the first team. O’Donnell returns after a head injury suffered at Neath whilst Chris Walker, Joel Hodgson and Andy Forsyth all return on the bench.