Willie Peters branded Hull KR’s display Las Vegas as the worst in his time at the club, describing the performance as ‘soft’.
Just nine days after winning the World Club Challenge, the Robins were thrashed 58-6 by Leeds Rhinos as they were well and truly outplayed in every aspect of the game.
The defeat leaves them with zero wins from two games, but more pressingly for Peters, he was livid with his side’s showing in front of a huge Hull KR following.
“Where do I start?” Peters said. “Beaten in every area, and to be honest, the people I feel sorry for are the fans that paid hard-earned money to come today to watch that. To spend or save money to come and watch their team play, and we deliver a performance like that, it’s just nowhere near good enough.
“And we need to all look at ourselves, myself at the top of that, to find out why we got that performance. But it certainly brought us back down to earth, that’s for sure. And we’re there to make sure that we action more than words and do something about it, because if that’s going to be the template of what we do this season, we’re in for a long season.”
Peters refused to use last week’s emotionally charged victory as an excuse for their showing.
“No excuses for that. Not that, not what we just delivered. If we perform and we get beat, then maybe there’s excuses why we ran out of petrol or whatever, but that performance is no excuse and I’m not going to sit here and deliver excuses of last week and all that sort of stuff, because it’s going to get tougher.”
When asked if it was the worst performance of his Hull KR tenure, Peters added: “Yeah, I can’t think of it, it would be the worst performance for sure.”
Peters was clearly fuming with his side’s outing but said he wouldn’t stop his players from going out in Las Vegas after the game if they wished to do so.
“They’re men, men make decisions, their own decisions. Most of the time, you’d like to think men make the right decisions around if they earned it or deserve it. It’s up to them.
“We’ve got to go see our fans and I’ll be there. I think people have organised something else. Whether they go to that, that’s up to them. We’ve got a responsibility to go back where we’re going to go back to now and greet our fans.
“If the players want to have a beer, they can have a beer, but if they decide to go out and do what they want to do, then that’s up to them. Again, they need to conduct themselves the right way. I’m not going to be saying, you’re not going out, they’re grown men. If they decide to go out, great. If they decide to go out, well, it’s up to them.”