Smith happy with Warrington’s ugliness

Warrington Wolves coach Tony Smith was pleased that his team managed to grind out a win against Salford on Sunday.

The Wire won 36-20, but Smith admitted that his players had difficulty finding a flow against the Red Devils.

“It was ugly but we got there. I thought our first 20 minutes were way off,” said Smith.

“There were some signs that we weren’t quite on our game. To their credit the players realised that and fixed a bit of it up in the first half.

“It was hard to get flowing in that game. In their opinions it was a very frustrating game.

“Earlier in the season we wouldn’t have come up with a ‘W’ at the end of the match in that sort of circumstance, but this time we did.

“I thought most of the time our defence was very good. We had a lapse where we let in a try from dummy half. I haven’t seen that for weeks and weeks from us.

“And [we conceded] two from kicks, which doesn’t please us.

“But aside from that, I thougth we defended some of those Wigan type plays very well. But we were off the mark there today.”

There were some injuries for Wolves players too, with Ben Evans and Joel Monaghan sustaining ankle and jaw problems respectively.

“It doesn’t look good, it’s an ankle,” Smith said of Evans.

“It’s not a break, and sometimes it can be better if it is. You can put them in a cast and treat them.

“We’ll get him scanned but it’s not looking pretty for him or us at the moment.”

He added:  “We had a bit of a scare with Joel, we think he dislocated his jaw. We think it came out and then went back in.

“First view was that he broke it. He felt like it might have been gone, but it had gone back in place by the time we got him back in the changing room.

“A big sigh of relief on that one.”