North Wales Crusaders head coach Carl Forster said his side are focused on getting their title charge back on track this weekend as they face a trip to Rochdale Hornets on Sunday.
Forster’s side suffered just their second defeat of the season as Swinton Lions ran out 24-12 victors at Stadiwm CSM, capitalising on uncharacteristic errors from Crusaders last weekend.
The result means that North Wales’ wait for the Betfred League One title goes on with a journey to the Crown Oil Arena the next task at hand.
Looking ahead to the game, Forster said: “We’ve got back in and dusted ourselves off, we’ve had some honest conversations around the Swinton defeat, there were some errors in there but as cliche as it sounds, we win and lose as a team, and we’ll bounce back.
“It felt a bit like the end of the world at full-time on Sunday, but when you take the emotions away, it’s only our second league defeat of the season, we’ve got four games left and need two wins to seal the title so the focus now is on what we have to do.
“That starts this weekend against Rochdale, who I think are a lot stronger than their league position suggests.
“If you look at the points for and against then it probably tells you a better story of what they’re about and how difficult they can be to break down.
“They’ve gone to Goole just two weeks ago and put 50 on them, so we can’t think that just turning up Sunday will be enough – far from it.
“Friday we’ll take a closer look at them but also have a talk about ourselves going into that game and the fact that we probably feel we owe it to us as a group to show what we can do after the disappointment last week.
“We’ve got big characters in this group, and the mood is just one of focus now, we’ve picked ourselves up and we’ll be ready to go again this weekend.
“Our last defeat in the league saw us kick-start a good run of form so let’s get that back going again now.”