McDermott: Westwood incident not to blame

Brian McDermott refused to blame the match officials after Leeds’ 25-14 defeat at Warrington on Friday.

The hosts could count themselves lucky not to get a red card inside the first minute when second-row forward Ben Westwood dished out a late hit on Liam Sutcliffe.

Westwood was sin-binned for the stiff-arm late tackle which put Sutcliffe out of the game, but McDermott said it had no bearing on the result.

“I haven’t seen it enough (the Westwood incident) – he certainly doesn’t miss, but I wouldn’t comment on it and it wasn’t the reason we lost the game.

“If you were to go through our performance in detail, you’d find one or two things where we weren’t as good as we should be.

“We didn’t get much momentum with the ball in the first-half, but Warrington’s kicking game was not far off a ten out of ten tonight.

“We wanted to be more inventive with the ball. I find it hard to be critical of my team, though. They dug in and showed a lot of spirit.”