Revenge not on the agenda for Grady

North Wales Crusaders’ boss Mike Grady says that revenge for the recent cup final defeat against Barrow is not something he’s thinking about ahead of Saturday’s league game between the two teams.

The Crusaders were beaten 38-32 by the Raiders at the Summer Bash in Blackpool, but Grady believes that result will have no bearing on this weekend’s clash.

“We’ll take one thing from the final which is that we managed to push Barrow close and in truth should have won the game,” said Grady.

“However, revenge isn’t really on our minds – this is a different competition and so we’ll prepare for the game without thinking too much about what happened in the final.

“Barrow had some players out and had come into that game after a tough run of fixtures, and we also had lads out so the two sides could look different which will bring different challenges.

“Therefore, we’ll prepare for what is to come, which will be a very tough game.

“It’s been a really strange season for us so far – there’s probably three games which we can look back on and think that we should have won them, and with the league so tight at the moment those points would have taken us into a great position.

“I’m obviously frustrated with last weekend’s result (a 25-24 defeat against Workington). We had a perfectly good try ruled out which I’ve spoken to the RFL about. However, we can’t change anything and, as frustrating as that is, we have to deal with it.

“Another thing that I’ve taken from last weekend is that we need to work on seeing games out. To be 18-0 up with just 15 minutes gone and then go onto lose the game in the way we did was annoying for all the lads.

“We’ll work on that and look to push on starting from this weekend. I firmly believe that a spot in the top-eight is still to play for and so we want to push for that.”