Batley v Swinton preview: Craig Lingard wants Bulldogs to secure play-off spot as ‘quickly’ as possible

With 13 games remaining of the regular season, the Bulldogs, mainly thanks to an ongoing six-game winning run, are currently in joint-second position in the Championship and hold a six-point cushion over Widnes Vikings in seventh. Above them, it is the same gap to Featherstone Rovers, who lost for the time in the league against Toulouse last Saturday, at the top of the table.

Lingard said: “Realistically, Featherstone are still way out in front of everybody else. They have had a bit of a blip with that one game but, where they are, it is going to be difficult for any team to claw them back.

“We are certainly not focussed on winning the league, position-wise. We just want to secure our play-off spot as quickly as we can. We are in that period now where teams will be taking points off each other. Toulouse play Sheffield this weekend so one of them is going to lose.

“If we keep picking up our two points it means that the gap between us and seventh place will get bigger and bigger. That is our goal at the end of the season, to be in that top six.

“There are six points now between ourselves and seventh so we have got a little bit of a cushion there but, like every other team in the division, you are going to have a blip at some point. We need to get as many points on the board to accommodate for that potential blip.”

And Lingard is hoping that the winning streak continues on Sunday, June 18 (kick off 3pm) when they make the trip to a Swinton Lions side who surprised the Bulldogs in only the second game of the season.

“They say a happy camp’s a winning camp and that a winning camp’s a happy camp,” the head coach said. “Which one comes first? Do you get the happy camp before you win or do you need to win before that camp is happy? It is a difficult question to answer. But we seem to be there at the minute and our defence this year is so much better.

“But Swinton have already beaten us this year. We talked in the prep to Newcastle about not wanting to undo all that hard work by getting beat by the bottom of the table. That message is going to be exactly the same this week.

“They are down there second bottom of the table but we know how good they are. There is a point to prove for us. We are expecting a really good Swinton performance but we need to look after our own game.

“We need to prepare for Swinton bringing their ‘A-Game’ and them being as good as they were up at Mount Pleasant earlier in the season. If they are, and we’re slightly off, they will beat us, there’s no two ways about it.

“There are no easy games in the Championship this year and there are shocks every week.

“But, if results go our way, we beat Swinton and Toulouse beat Sheffield, then we could be sitting second in the table outright which would be phenomenal.”