“I THINK we carry too many people mentally. There’s not enough grit and fight.”

That was the scathing verdict of head coach James Ford after his York City Knights side threw away a commanding position for a second successive match in losing 35-28 at expansion club Oxford.

The shock result, following the reverse to North Wales, left the Knights still with only one win in four League One outings.

Ford’s team was much-depleted but he insisted the 17 on show should still have won, especially after leading 10-0, 22-12 and 28-18 in the first half. However, after conceding a freak equaliser with 14 minutes to go and then losing skipper Ed Smith to a yellow card, they crumbled late on.

“We were two scores up on three occasions, which shows we do some really good things,” said Ford.

“But we let the pressure off with six penalties and six handling errors in the second half. You’d struggle to beat anybody if you perform like that – it’s an awful lot of turnover in 40 minutes. I know we’re a young team but we need to improve and improve quickly.

“We get into a commanding position and, with a bit more focus and a bit more attention to detail, we would win the game. But at the minute we’re not showing that and it’s hurting us.

“Credit to Oxford and their resilience. They hung in there. They’ve got the points and, if I’m honest, they deserved it.

“But we did feed them a lot. If you’re going to make that many errors you feed the other team’s enthusiasm, as well as gift them territory, and defensively we weren’t good enough to deal with it.”

The Knights had few attacking sets in the second half.

Ford said: “I don’t think we struggled for metres but we didn’t make many line breaks and Oxford defended with attitude.

“But we still scored nearly 30 points away from home which should be enough to win the game.

“I’m more worried about our defensive attitude.”

Smith was yellow-carded after taking out Oxford full-back Max Jowitt under a high ball. It appeared accidental but still left the Knights a man down for the last 10 minutes, in which time they conceded seven points to lose the game.

Ford said: “It looked like a big collision, and there was rightly concern for Max.

“Ed’s gone to challenge for the ball and both players were looking at the ball and they’ve collided. Luckily for everybody Max is fine.”

He added: “We were actually down to 11 men (when Oxford went ahead with a drop goal) as the medics or ref did not stop the game when we had a man injured and they went up the field and put the one point over.”

He added: “I don’t want to take anything away from Oxford - they deserve the points. But in the second half we were really poor and we need a response.”

Ford had been without eight players, including some key men, but he said: “It’s a factor to be mentioned but quite clearly the 17 out there were good enough to win that game.

“I think we carry too many people mentally. There’s not enough grit and fight.

“I don’t think we were complacent. We spoke about focussing on us and playing with intensity, and for patches we did do that.

“I think we’ve got a concentration issue and we need to have more fight, to keep working when we’re tired. It’s a lack of grit.”

The Knights host old rivals Doncaster on Good Friday and Ford added: “We will get there, but we need to see a response sooner rather than later.”