‘It was our best performance of the season’ - Craig Lingard hails Batley Bulldogs’ ‘outstanding’ performance against Halifax Panthers

A terrific treble from Luke Hooley - on his way to an impressive individual 26-point haul - was the highlight of a superb team display, which also included two tries for Dane Manning and one apiece for George Senior and Josh Hodson.

“I am absolutely delighted,” admitted Lingard. “It’s nice that you can win some close games by a point or win by a score but it’s nice every now and again to have a game where you win by a lot of points and there’s no pressure coming to the last five minutes.

“I thought they were absolutely outstanding and I thought it was our best performance of the season.”

He added: “I think it was Vince Lombardi who said if you strive for perfection you will never achieve it but in your effort to strive for perfection you might achieve excellence - and I thought we were excellent today.

“As a coach you are always looking at areas where you need to improve. A couple of our end of sets were poor today which gave Halifax a little bit of field position but when you’re looking at things like that in a 42-0 victory, you really are clutching at straws where the team can improve.

“Across the board, 1 to 17, they were all excellent.”

Before the game, Lingard had said matches between the two sides were always close and exciting. His counterpart, Simon Grix, revealed in his post-match interview that he “didn’t see” this scoreline coming.

Asked if he saw it coming, Lingard answered:

“Not at all. Games between Halifax and Batley, since I’ve been back as coach, have always been extremely close, nip and tuck. There’s normally a score or two between each team and that’s it. I never, ever saw this at all. Never predicted this at all.

“We had been preparing all week for the best Halifax side. They have been under a little bit of pressure and have been low on confidence, so we knew how they’d be preparing this week and knew they would select a team based on effort and will because that is what they were talking about.

“So we prepared for it as much as we possibly could. But to put in a performance like that against a top quality side is unbelievable.”

Although Hooley, who Batley have signed on dual registration terms from Leeds Rhinos, stole the headlines with his performance, Lingard was also impressed with his “engine room and middles,” especially Samy Kibula who Fax struggle to contain.

He said: “Luke gets the headlines for the points that he scores and the tries that he scores but the engine room and middles were outstanding.

“Samy started the first few games and then missed out because we weren’t happy with his minutes and repeat efforts on the field and he was coming off after a short amount of time. I am not after our middles playing a huge amount of minutes but he was coming off after seven or eight minutes into the second half, and we needed more from him.

“We gave him that challenge and Oldham wanted to take him on a month’s loan which we were happy with and a challenge for him to play some long minutes and train, lose a bit of weight and come back in a better condition.

“There are two things that can happen when you say that to a player; one is he can take his bat and ball home and doesn’t do it; the other is he embraces that challenge. Samy did that. Praise to Oldham as well for him coming back in the shape that he did and Samy takes a lot of credit for that too.

“I don’t think he was great last week and he got in by the skin of his teeth today. We had that chat on Saturday morning, it was either him or Keegan Hirst and we went with Samy and told him he needed to be better for us this week and he took that challenge and he was great.”

On the team’s second half display, which took the score from 12-0 to 42-0, Lingard said:

“The challenge for us was to be as good, if not better in the second half as we were in the first. I think we were better. That was pleasing from a coaching point of view. They backed up the first 40 minutes with a second 40-minute performance.

“We managed feld position, we completed our sets and made Halifax do a lot of defensive efforts, so once we started scoring points, it was easy to score points at a fairly consistent rate.

“That was built on the back of some really great defence. It was typified, when the game was already won at the time, when Dale Morton shot out and put a real good hit on Lachlan Walmsley and we followed it up on the next tackle where two or three men got in the tackle and made some great contact and Halifax came up with an error.

“Even at 42-0 we were still scrambling around to keep that zero on the board. It was really, really pleasing.”