Barrow Raiders will be looking to bounce back in Sunday’s Championship clash at home to Sheffield after a defeat in their opening game.
The Raiders went down 24-4 to Toulouse Olympique who had been relegated from Super League last year.
New forward Greg Burke has challenged his team-mates to bounce back quickly from that disappointment when they take on the Eagles, who also lost at the weekend.
Burke has played over 160 games in Super League during his career and the 29-year-old has been reflecting on the opening defeat. He believes the squad needs to tidy up the basics of their game in order to give themselves a shot at victory.
He told the Barrow website: “Yes, Toulouse had a high turnover of players, but they’ve still got a lot of Super League-standard players in there.
“Saying that, we didn’t do ourselves justice. We were very poor in terms of completion. Against a team like that, we need to complete high, and we just didn’t do that.
“If you’re even going to give yourself a chance against a good standard of opposition, you’ve no chance of getting a result, and that’s sadly what occurred.
“At training, Cresta [Paul Crarey] will show us the video, and there’s a hell of a lot that we can do better, both offensively and defensively.
“We’ve got to be more respectful of the ball by completing high and hopefully turn that into a successful team performance.
“We’ve got a lot of experienced players that will take a look at themselves, put their hands up and want to be a lot better than they were last week.
“Being at home twice, we don’t want to come away with no points. You want to try and win as many home games as possible, and we’ll get another crack at it this week. The team will be eager to come out and get a result.
“If we can be more consistent across the board, that’s the key.”
Crarey himself admitted to be pretty disappointed about the performance against the French side.
He said: “If you run at 65 per cent completion, commit 11 errors, give the ball away cheaply and miss try-scoring opportunities, you won’t do anything in this division,.
“I’m pretty disappointed. It’s the first time I’ve ever gone in and expressed my feelings after the game because I know we’re better than that.
“Some of the forwards worked extremely hard but we were very wasteful in the backline. I thought we set up and played a bit too lateral instead of rolling through their middle.
“When we did that after we’d spoken at half-time, we had a spell where we were in control of the game or stayed with them.”
