THE good news for Catalans Dragons on Friday was they scored their first try in five hours and 12 minutes of rugby league. The bad news was they were still hammered 68-6 by Betfred Super League leaders Hull KR.
The French side slumped to their sixth-consecutive defeat in the Round 14 match agaist the Betfred Challenge Cup winners at Sewell Group Craven Park, and have now been out-scored 186-6 in their past four games alone.
The misery was compounded by long-serving captain Ben Garcia being sent off in the first half for throwing punches and sparking a wild brawl, and interim head coach Joel Tomkins was unhappy with the attitude from his side throughout the contest.
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“Towards the back end of each half, I thought we looked like we gave up, to be honest,” Tomkins told Sky Sports.
“We’re low on confidence, we’re low on energy and we looked like a few of our boys probably gave up at the end, which is the ultimate disrespect to the jersey. As a group, we’re going to have to start doing some really hard work.
“We have to stick together, for one – we can’t be pointing fingers. I’ve been in dressing rooms as a player and when you start pointing fingers, there’s only one way it’s going to go and that’s down. We have to try to stay positive if there’s anything positive we can take from it.
“It’s got to really hurt, this. We were nilled three weeks in a row and then we turned up tonight and, to me, it looks like it doesn’t hurt as much as it should have done.”
It is barely four years since Catalans claimed a maiden League Leaders’ Shield and reached a first Super League grand final, but now find themselves ninth in the table with just five wins to their name at the midway point of the season albeit still with a chance of making the play-offs.
Recently-departed head coach Steve McNamara, who guided them to those heights in 2021 as well as a historic Challenge Cup triumph in 2018, was among those watching in East Hull on Friday.
One can only imagine what the former England boss was thinking watching his old side being overrun by the hosts, but ex-Dragons second row Tomkins left no one in any doubt about his views.
“It’s unbelievably embarrassing, to be honest – for me, for the club and for the group of players especially,” Tomkins said.
“We’re just not there at the minute and we’re going to have to get ourselves out of it because nobody is going to help us.
“For me, the only way we’re going to do that is working a bit harder than we are because to come up against a team like that, it’s just based on effort, the one-percent things and all the little cliches coaches talk about.
“But it’s what wins you games, it’s what Hull KR do, and we’re absolutely nowhere near at the moment.”