SIMON SMITH: Our best performance to date

The guys kept their performance levels up throughout the 80 minutes, the forwards in particular were exceptional.We’ve been working hard on our scrummaging and line-outs and that showed during the game at a tough Middlesbrough side, who ran York close the week before.So to go up there and put 40 points on them and score six tries is a great effort.It’s really easy when it comes to picking a man of the match to overlook our captain and coach Matty Jones, but I thought he deserved it on Saturday.Matty has got himself a lot fitter this season and is performing really well. He embodies everything that we are about as a side.There were a few incidents in the second half, when Sam Dawson and Nino Cutino were both given red cards and Jordan Wakeham was sin-binned.I said to the guys after the game that I was proud of them for fronting up and standing their ground, Scarborough have been accused of having a soft underbelly in the past and it was good to see them refusing to be bullied.Having said that, for all three red cards and the sin-bin, the players put the referee in a position where he had to make a decision.I didn’t see Sam’s incident, so it would be impossible to comment.Nino’s happened right in front of us, and he was sent off for retaliating, maybe on another day it would’ve been a yellow card.Jordan gave the referee no choice but to sin-bin him, so we can have no complaints there.We’ll be without Sam and Nino for our Yorkshire Shield encounter at Old Brodleians on Saturday, as they’ll be suspended until they have a hearing with the Yorkshire RFU.Brods have won all six of their league games this season, and we play them two weeks running now.It will be a good marker for our league game at Silver Royd next week.We will go in with our strongest team available, and we’ll be optimistic of doing well after the performances in our last two games.If we can go to Brods and win in the Shield, there’s no reason why we can’t go on a good run in the competition.