YORK Knights head coach Andrew Henderson was disappointed to have conceded 50 points to Wakefield Trinity on home soil this afternoon - but had no complaints about the efforts of his depleted squad against the Betfred Championship favourites.

Connor Bailey provided the Knights’ only reply, with Australian winger Lachlan Walmsley and full-back Max Jowitt leading Wakefield’s charge to a 50-6 victory at the LNER Community Stadium.

And with Batley Bulldogs claiming their first points of the season at Whitehaven, the Knights fell to the foot of the table as a result.

Henderson reflected: “Obviously, we’ve proved to be second best conceding 50 points, and I’m disappointed with that to be honest, conceding 50 at home regardless of what team we had out there today.

“But I feel that there were some patches where we showed some encouraging signs and some really good effort. At times, we controlled the tackle, but then we’d lose one and that would hurt us, and the couple of errors or penalties back-to-back put us in poor field position and Wakefield were able to capitalise.

“Wakefield are a very good side and the way they play, they’re fast, they’re strong, they’re powerful and they execute well. They’ve got some wonderful players at their disposal, and unfortunately for us today, we couldn’t always handle the threat that was coming at us.

“But I felt we didn’t help ourselves on occasion and I thought there were a couple of calls that probably went against us in the game which probably would have helped us.

“I’m not saying it would have made us get the scoreline, but it would have helped us at times when we were already on the back foot, and then you get compounded, and a couple of calls go against you, and it just puts you under more pressure. We couldn’t stem the tide.

“But I’ll give some credit to the team in the way that we’re 30-6 at half time and I think that could have really opened up in the second. But we did stiffen up a little bit and we put them under a bit more pressure and forced some errors.

“Obviously at the back end of the game I think they put three tries up and that was disappointing, but I thought we really got into the fight that second half, there or there abouts, for 25 minutes of it.

“But we just didn’t quite have enough with the ball to really trouble them and effectively we just got a bit disconnected at times out there.

“I certainly won’t take anything away from the effort of our players. I thought once again they demonstrated that against a far superior side today.”

The Knights started brightly, with Wakefield’s kick-off flying out on the full, and both Bailey and Ata Hingano forced goal-line drop-outs with less than five minutes on the clock.

However, they could not take their opportunities, and when Walmsley opened the scoring for the visitors after capitalising on an error, it was one way traffic from thereon.

“I thought there were some encouraging signs from us,” Henderson explained. “In that opening stage I thought we played some great football and asked a lot of questions about that Wakefield team, and it took some desperate defending from them to hold us out.

“I thought Ata Hingano was outstanding. I think he deserved that Man of the Match. He was a real thorn in that Wakefield side. Whenever he got the ball, he really challenged the Wakefield defence and kept them guessing. It’s just a shame that we didn’t have enough creativity around him to support him I guess.

“But I thought he was wonderful today for us. I think he did some really good things and defensively did a good job for us too, so I thought that he was deserving of that.

“I felt that the opening 10 or 12 minutes that we put Wakefield under a lot of pressure and it was encouraging for us. But unfortunately, we concede that try.

“I’m not really sure that should have been a try that first one, the ball hadn’t cleared the ruck so I don’t think it should have been a try. But that is what it is and it went against us.

“There were a couple after that we conceded which just weren’t good enough in terms of looking over our inside shoulder and some systematic issues there. That was disappointing, but there were some encouraging signs out there. I think the boys had a crack.

“Sometimes I think when you’re trying too hard at times to solve it and fix it, you end up coming out of the system and that’s what happened a couple of times defensively.”

“We didn’t quite stay in the system, and that hurt us.”