Doncaster RLFC: Richard Horne satisfied with Dons' progress

“We worked hard in pre-season trying to make both the players and the team better and you can see that in games and things are starting to come together,” said head coach Richard Horne.

“It’s not perfect but we’ll aspire to keep working hard in training and making things right.”

Although pleased with the result and the club’s start in general, Horne says his unbeaten side will need to be on their game this weekend.

“They had a couple of players out on Friday and I expect them to have worked on areas of their game so I’d expect them to be a lot better on Sunday. So we’ve got to make sure that we are better as well.”

Reflecting on Friday night’s fourth round win Horne said: “We won easily in the end but we made hard work of it in the first half.

“We spent most of the time penned in our own half but we had two good opportunities and we took them to lead 12-0.

“I thought that we defended our line really well because they shifted the ball well and moved us about but we dealt with it.

“Being more steely in our try-line defence is something we’ve spoken about in recent weeks because we want to cut out conceding easy tries.

“We scrambled really well when we needed to and we had some real string in what we did defensively and to nil them was really pleasing.”

Scrum-half Liam Harris was named man-of-the-match by Doncaster Knights boss Clive Griffiths, a guest at the game.

“Liam is playing well and he’s doing what we brought him here to do,” said Horne.

“We are still working on things with him which will hopefully make both him and the team better.

“But it just wasn’t Liam who played well, it was a team effort. All the boys we brought in on Friday fronted up well and that will give me problems when it comes to selecting a team to play Newcastle.

“It was a tough physical game and we picked up a few bumps and bruises so we’ll have to see how that is looking.

“I don’t have to take a risk with anybody because we’ve got cover within the squad and I’ve also got access to some really good players at Hull who train with us.”