It would be easy to go to town on a poor performance today but that's all been said on the pitch. The lads should be in no doubt where we were lacking. Most of all, an undefeated record doesn't allow us to rock up with poor personal preparation and coast to victory. Past efforts mean nothing once the whistle goes again.

Neither does previous success guarantee that others will always share more than the burden of hard work on behalf of the rest of the team. Today was a quite brutal lesson in resting on our individual and collective laurels.

Despite the result, we've not become a bad team overnight. Yes, some weaknesses have been exposed but the positives from that are that we know what we need to fix and, crucially, we have excellent players to be able to do it. We've learned far more from today about the team than we would have, had the score line been reversed.

A poor first half saw us repeatedly concede territory to some powerful opposition runners, fall off tackles and let their backs get outside and round us far too easily. We were 20-0 down before we'd put more than a few phases together ourselves. The coaches asked for a reaction at half-time and we got one. Not quite as loud or as physical as we'd have liked, and some problems, particularly tackling, persisted, but there were signs that the fires were still burning, no matter how deeply they were smouldering. We loved Teddy telling Steve not to dare taking him off when he was down injured (and presumably planning his revenge...)

The two tries we scored either side of half time were finished superbly by Andy and Rio. We could and should have had a couple more with Harry Coffin coming close to diving over and more than one overlap squandered with slow ball and drifting running lines taking up the space. Communication is the key to the vast majority of the improvements we need to see, and while the referee will attest to how much our lads like to chat, we need to channel it in the right way.

We also know that we can close teams down better than we did. Our backs are at least equal to Wirral's and we looked dangerous when we were able to counterattack. That has to be part of our game plan, putting teams under pressure and forcing kicks to allow our broken-field runners to exploit the gaps in which they thrive.

On that note, Man of the Match went to Andy for his positional play, tackling and his excellent line breaks.

Hopefully the lads who took knocks have a speedy recovery. We've told the boys to try and watch more professional games if they can, particularly focusing on players in the positions they play in themselves. Hopefully they will see some things those players do well that they can try and bring to their own games.

Back to training on Thursday - Chester at home next week will be a good opportunity to put things right.