Kingstone Press League 1 Preview: South Wales Scorpions v Coventry Bears

Despite being hammered 66-6 at league leaders Keighley Cougars last week South Wales Scorpions were able to take some positives out of the game, according to assistant coach Paul Emanuelli.

“The score didn’t really reflect the performance,” he said.

“We went up there with 16 players, including two from Valley Cougars, and to be honest we did ourselves proud. We had three or four disallowed tries but they were a far superior side.

“It’s more about going forward and just keeping that good feeling ready for the run of games that we’re targeting which is Coventry, London and Gloucester.

“We’re going to base this week on performance rather than result. I think we looked too much to get a result when we had London at home and that was probably our biggest downfall because our performance was awful.

“This week everything’s going to be geared towards performance.

“Me and Mike (Grady) have done our review on Coventry and we’ll be working on where we think we can beat them and approach it like we do any other game.”

Forward Neil Dallimore and skipper Connor Farrer could return this week.

Coventry Bears were beaten 78-8 at home by Swinton Lions last week but coach Tom Tsang was philosophical.

He said: “Sometimes you can look at yourself and say we were bad in this area or bad in that area but other times you’ve got to look at the opposition and say they were very, very good on the day.

“They were sensational, far and away the best attacking team we’ve played against this year. They were ruthless, especially in the first half, and we just didn’t have enough answers in defence to put up much of a fight.

“We knew at the start of the season there were going to be some tough games ahead and this was one of those events. We’ve got to learn from it, pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and go again.

“South Wales is one that we have to win, not necessarily for the league table particularly but to bounce back from last week and get ourselves back on track.

“There’s a few guys who want to right some wrongs from the weekend so I’m expecting a bit of a reaction. We should be able to go down there fired up and certainly see it as a must-win game.”