Craig Lingard hopes Batley Bulldogs' winning run continues at Newcastle Thunder

Batley’s narrow 14-8 victory over York Knights last weekend ensured a fifth league win on the spin, which propelled them to joint-second in the table, level on 18 points with Sheffield Eagles.

Newcastle, meanwhile, have not won since the opening round of fixtures in February and are five points adrift of safety.

Lingard, however, says his side will show Thunder the ‘respect’ they deserve.

“Their form has picked up a little bit, performance wise,” the head coach said. “They pushed Sheffield close and pushed Bradford close last Friday. Their performances are getting gradually better and another win is just around the corner for them.

“We have got to make sure that it is not at our expense and we do that by showing them the respect we show everybody else and getting up for the competition as we have been doing in the last five or six weeks.

“It is a really important game for us, probably more important than York or Halifax, because there is no pressure on you against those sorts of teams. There is no point winning our last five games against teams that are fighting to get into the top six if we then go away to Newcastle and get beat.

“We are in a position where we are playing bottom of the league, we’re joint second and we’re expected to go there and win convincingly but it doesn’t always happen like that. We know that we need to prepare like we do everybody else and put in a real committed performance.”

He added: “We can’t be expected to just turn up and get the victory. We had that this season when Swinton came to our place and turned us over in the second game of the season.

“We have fallen victim to that once before this season, we have got to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

On his side’s charge toward the top end of the table, Lingard assessed:

“I am immensely proud of what we have done so far. The games that we have won have shown that we can win tight games. Five of the last six games we have played we have won by eight points or less which shows when we get into a tight contest that we have got the know-how and the will to get through the other side, whether that’s by a point, less than a score or eight points - we have managed to get these games over the line.

“It would be a very different story if we’d have been losing these close games and we’d probably be sitting in the bottom half of the table as opposed to sitting joint second now.

“It’s really good that we can win these games and hopefully we can put in another good performance against Newcastle and cement that position at the top of the table.”