Whitehaven head coach Gary Charlton wasn’t impressed with his side’s second-half performance in Llanelli, despite the west Cumbrians beating West Wales Raiders 30-16.

Haven were 26-6 up at half-time but “lost” the second half 10-4, a fact that didn’t please Charlton in the slightest with a big Challenge Cup game against Rochdale Hornets facing them this coming weekend.

He said : “I was very disappointed with our second half performance. At 26-6 up, I thought we took our foot off the gas. I thought we weren’t as clinical as we were in the first half and we went away from everything that we had to do.

“I’m disappointed but take nothing away from West Wales, they stuck to their task, their enthusiasm was great and I thought they did well to win the second half.

“They came out and had a really good dig at us. We’re disappointed in the way we played, but ultimately, West Wales played some decent rugby in the second half and deserved to be as close as they were.”

Whitehaven won the game thanks to some really well-taken tries with Callum Phillips scoring a well-deserved hat-trick and it was an outstanding move that set up Chris Taylor for Haven’s lone second half points.

But it was a far cry from 2018 where Haven piled on 44 points against West Wales after half-time.

“We scored some brilliant tries today,” Charlton added. “Our problem was our defending.

“We’re not as fluent as what we should be moving forward and that’s what we need to work on. I just said to the boys that if you give away penalties then you’ll concede tries.

“We’re looking forward to next week’s Cup tie. We took a couple of knocks here but hopefully it won’t be too bad. We’ll roll our sleeves up and go again next week.”