Peters praises KR mentality after St Helens victory
Hull KR head coach Willie Peters praised his players for shutting out the prospect of next week's Betfred Challenge Cup final against Warrington at Wembley after brushing aside St Helens with a 34-4 Super League win at Craven Park.
A brilliant three-try burst in the final stages of the first half gave Rovers a healthy half-time lead and gave Peters the luxury of bringing star duo Tyrone May and Elliot Minchella off as a precautionary measure before the final hooter.
Peters said: "It could have gone either way in terms of mentality, but I like to think where this group is at now we would put in a performance like that, so I am really pleased and proud of the players.
"You need to play well against St Helens, you need to be physical and have the right mental approach and we had all those things. We did a fair bit of damage early in the game and we got rewarded late in the first half.
"We got that (late) try and I thought, 'OK, we've got a good lead here and we're safe', so it was a matter of being really smart in that back end, but we needed to win the game first."
Peters confirmed that ever-present Dean Hadley missed his first match of the season as purely a precautionary measure because he stands one point away from a potentially-costly suspension.
"If he'd had another charge, he could have been out for next week," added Peters. "We always said we wanted to pick our strongest team but we also needed to be smart in our approach by not taking a risk with Dean, because the way Dean plays, sometimes accidents happen."
Saints head coach Paul Wellens admitted his side were not up to the task as their recent run of two straight victories came to a juddering halt.
The visitors had only Lewis Murphy's first-half try to show for their efforts as Rovers' blistering opening period burst sent them reeling to another costly defeat.
"They beat us to the punch, basically," admitted Wellens. "We made things really difficult for ourselves and I thought it came off the back of us not being physically where we needed to be.
"When you play against teams like Hull KR, you need to have a bit more resilience. I'm not shying away from that, but we have done a lot of good things in the last few weeks and we need to be able to do that in games like tonight, where you don't have it all your own way."
Saints now find themselves clinging onto the play-off places at the midway point of the season, a far cry from previous eras of domination.
"We're not where we want to be," added Wellens. "It's been too inconsistent and the challenge for us is to do something about it.
"I can't sit here and wave a magic wand and come up with superlatives around how we're going to do that.
"Our only way out of it is to stick together in the tough moments and work hard to make the obvious improvements."