Giants go top of Super League but Brown still laments poor discipline against Wildcats

Brown was pleased with a first-half performance that saw Giants 18-4 to the good but didn’t like the way in which his side allowed Wildcats to within four points of them immediately after the restart, owing largely to poor discipline.

“The first half was really good,” said Brown.

“We’d done all the hard work into the wind to lead 18-4. They’d thrown a lot of sets on our try-line and with the wind it makes it a little harder to get field position but we really worked hard and to come in at 18-4 I thought we’d done the hard work. We should have finished it off really well early in the second half but our discipline was disgraceful.

“Whether it be a referee penalising us for something, not finding touch, dropping the ball on the play line, running into touch on the play line. We just kept inviting them into the contest, on top of the four repeat sets they got to our zero, we really invited them into the game and they accepted the challenge.”

He continued: “We were really happy with our first half as a whole. We didn’t get a lot of opportunities but the few times we got down there we did well. In the second half every time we got down there we scored but we didn’t get down there due to our own faults which was disappointing. With the big breeze and Danny Brough in your side you should be doing better with that wind.”

The Giants coach decided to go for former Wildcat Aaron Murphy on the wing instead of another former Wakefield winger in Luke George. He said that decision was purely to give Murphy a first-team opportunity after missing most of the pre-season through injury.

His selection still helped Giants to top the table, however, something helped by Widnes Vikings’ shock 37-36 victory over Wigan Warriors.

It’s a good place to be for Brown but he’ll be telling his troops to keep their feet firmly on the ground.

“One thing the players and all of us don’t want to do is get carried away,” he said.

“It’s a long year, you’d rather be there than not be there but we don’t need to go table watching, we need to learn some lessons over what we did good today and what we didn’t do so well and make sure next week when we play Castleford we go out and improve a little.”

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