NATHAN Brown reflects on the bad defeat by Warrington, but looks ahead positively to Friday’s game at Huddersfield, in conversation with Mike Critchley.

MC: What was the physical damage after another punishing game?

NB: Shannon McDonnell broke his jaw, but does not need an operation, so that’s the best end to a broken jaw you can have. That is going to be a six-week absence.

Matty Dawson only has a dead leg and is therefore likely to start, while Alex Walmsley is 50:50 for Huddersfield, but will definitely play again this year.

MC: You have gone through plans B, C, D and E — it must be frustrating constantly having to re-draw the battle plan due to losing even more players.

NB: Generally the key is trying to swap a player for a player but our squad is not in that position at the moment so sometimes we have to move people about to fit in. But the people who will play full back and five eighth this week have played Super League there this year and done plenty of training there and that gives me plenty of comfort in that decision.

MC: When games have gone wrong this year, they have done so badly. Why did Thursday unravel?

NB: Unfortunately we had a fair number of blokes who were below where you would like them to be — all on the same night.

We got off to a reasonable start, but Warrington used their small men very effectively. At the Etihad it was their bigger men who punished us, but here it was their small fellas and we did not adapt to that.

Matty Russell and Michael Monaghan caused us a lot of trouble. Monaghan is playing as well as he has played in England. They caused us some trouble and we didn’t adapt as we would have liked. Sometimes you have to take your hat off to the opposition.

I don’t think Warrington got enough credit for Thursday, everyone instead said St Helens were hopeless. They were very effective with how they approached the game.

MC: What do you want from your players after last week?

NB: A good, committed effort. I would like to think we can get 15-17 players putting in a good solid performance and competing hard for each other. It does not guarantee a win but it gives us a chance. We don’t want a number of people below 7/10 and we don’t want anyone with an attitude that is anything but first class.

Last week we had players who would say their performances were below par. A good example is Tommy Makinson dropping two kicks under not much pressure. I have not seen him drop a kick in two years. We had half a dozen players who had uncharacteristic games in little areas.

Sometimes it happens. To be honest, I would rather a lot of them have them the other day than four or five have it this week. Hopefully it is out of their system now and we get back on the horse and back to playing good solid footy this week.

MC: Once you get into the play-offs can you call Ade back in?

NB: It is something I will talk to Mike Rush about over the course of next week. Gardsy was at Hull KR until the end of term but they cannot make the play-offs now. It was not a thing we were thinking about but something we will look at.