Workington Town eventually fell to a Halifax side who are challenging for the Championship Shield 46-26.

Phil Veivers was forced to name only 14 players on his teamsheet due to the crippling injury toll that has ravaged his squad but the players never gave up and were in the game right up until the final 15 minutes when they simply ran out of steam.

Veivers was left frustrated by some of the refereeing decisions, insisting they had too much impact on crucial parts of the game:

“If we had gone in at 16-12 at half-time, which we should have done, it could have been different,” he said.

“Their try before half-time was ridiculous. There was a blatant knock on. The ball came off Ben Johnstone’s hand and into the post but no- one could see it! It probably still wouldn’t have done us justice. I thought in the first half we were the better side.”

But the Workington boss was understandably proud of his charges after they fought right until the end.

“Overall our effort was great but we just didn’t have enough players.”

“We needed to just have the belief in what we were doing as we were troubling them with what we threw at them.

“The big thing for us was to conserve our energy and complete our sets because we knew we would struggle with that towards the back end of the game.”

When asked to comment about the fact that his side had taken to the field with only 14 fit players, Veivers was blunt in his assessment:

“It’s been the story of our season. We started the game with seven on the sidelines and we’ve never really got past one week without less than five out. The most we have had at one stage was 13 which is what we had today.”