LEE DOUGLAS: Ladies’ numbers at training puts seniors to shame

I have seen the girls in training and they’ve looked terrific going forward.

For whatever reason on Saturday, they just couldn’t find a way through their bigger opponents.

From speaking to their coach Alex Conlin after the game, he was quite annoyed that Barnsley had a few players who appeared to have been playing rugby for a good few years.

But they can take confidence from their first performance.

They have another game this weekend when they play Workington on Sunday and I’m sure they’ll get a better result.

You can see how together they are in training and the numbers they get turning up puts the senior men to shame sometimes.

They sometimes have more at their training sessions than us and it’s a bit of an embarrassment to the lads.

Hopefully it will be onwards and upwards for the girls now as they go into their second game and I wish them good luck.

We followed the girls onto the pitch on Saturday and we put in a superb, controlled performance against a tough Pontefract side.

Our forwards really took it to them, after they set out their stall early on to make it a forward-orientated contest.

We stopped their rolling maul with authority and took it to them in the scrum too, and their strong scrum didn’t cause us too many problems.

The first 20 minutes was a bit of an arm wrestle, but we took control after that and never looked back.

It still wasn’t a perfect performance, we can still improve.

Our backs were static at times and the bizarre sending-off of Eamon Chapman ever so slightly put a downer on a superb result.

The referee admitted he may have made a mistake with it and we’ll have to await the decision of the disciplinary committee.

Overall I was really pleased with the performance of the guys and it’s key that we carry our form into our game at Heath this week.

It’s a tough place to go and we’ll need to be at our best.