Chester hails Hull KR’s dominant first half

Hulll KR coach Chris Chester was delighted with his team’s first-half display in their Challenge Cup quarter-final win over Catalans Dragons on Thursday night.

But he acknowledged that the second-half performance showed that there was still plenty of room for improvement.

“We were very dominant in that first half, we were very good defensively and we put them under pressure,” he told his club’s official website.

“We were pretty sloppy in the second half and we’ll need to be better but the main thing is we are in that hat for the semi-final.

“We know what a good team Catalans are, they have a lot of fantastic players and they caused us a lot of problems but we got the result and that was all that mattered.

“We now need to back this up against Salford on Tuesday and Huddersfield next weekend because the focus now is back on Super League.”

Catalans produced a fine comeback in the second half, but Rovers hung on, and Chester was pleased with the resilience his players showed.

“The game plan was to go through the middle of them and take some juice out of them early doors and then move them around a little bit,” he explained.

“We got some joy from that and scored some great tries.

“Catalans got back into the game in the second half but credit to my boys, they really dug in and got us over the line. It was a good all-round performance.”