Whitehaven coach James Coyle labelled his team as complacent following their defeat against Oldham, in which they relinquished an early 12-point lead, before eventually going down 26-18.

“After a good start, I think we thought we’d done enough to kill Oldham off,” said Coyle.

“I think we thought they would just lie down, because going into the game they were probably a little bit fragile, as they’d had some poor results recently.”

“It’s not a boxing match. You don’t get a knockout. You’ve got to play for 80 minutes and we didn’t complete sets. They’re a team that if you give them possession they’ll just keep on going with you.”

When discussing why his side were unable to regain their stranglehold on the match, he said: “Once you lose your mentality I think it’s difficult to get it back.

“Once you lose it and you give up that mental toughness you came into the game with and made us start really well, that is not something you can just switch on and off. Once you lose it, it’s really difficult to get back and they’ve got the momentum, they’ve got the bit between their teeth. It’s not something you can switch back on.”

He also paid credit to Oldham: “The longer the game went on, the more confident they got. I thought they improved over the eighty minutes. They were better than us in every aspect of the game. They got the result, because they were the better team.”

Despite the negative result, Coyle was positive when addressing Whitehaven’s hopes for the remainder of the season: “We’ve got to perform well until the end of the season. There’s a good chance of us getting into the playoffs for the shield.

“If we can put some results together, we can get ourselves a big game at the end of the year to finish on a high.”