Workington Town prop forward Kris Coward believes that this weekend’s derby game with Whitehaven could be won or lost in the first 20 minutes.

Town have won the three competitive derbies played between the two sides this year and also claimed the Ike Southward Memorial trophy in pre-season.

Both Town and Haven are going into this weekend’s fixture on the back of defeats but Coward also believes that the form book has to be thrown out the window ahead of Sunday’s game, kick-off 3pm.

“Whoever starts fastest and completes the most sets in the first 20 minutes will really set themselves up for the rest of the game,” Coward said. “People are writing Whitehaven off but you can’t take any sort of form into a derby game at all.

“It’s all about whoever makes the fewest mistakes, everyone will be fired up for the game and you can get over-excited.

“It’s a really important game for both sides and with Hunslet playing Featherstone on Friday night it could put a bit more pressure on Whitehaven.

“That could work for us or against us because they will know what they need to do.”

Coward was part of the Town side which lost 50-10 to London at the weekend and he admitted he was disappointed with the performance when he watched it back.

“We had a good training session on Tuesday and we watched through the video,” he continued. “We were given it to look at beforehand and it was odd watching it.

“We were in the game at 12-6 and then it all went to pot and then turned into damage limitation.

“Our heads went in the second half but the damage was done in the first half when we didn’t complete our sets and were forced to do a lot of defending.

“The conditions were really tough on the day and if you come up with mistakes like that you’ll be punished.

“We pride ourselves on our goal-line defence and grinding teams down, unfortunately that didn’t happen on Sunday.”