HEAD coach James Ford has revealed he took some of the blame for York City Knights' "scratchy" performance with the ball in Sunday's friendly win over Hunslet.

The Knights beat their League One rivals 30-6 in their final outing of pre-season but 18 of the points came via three tries in the last four minutes, with Ford's men having scored one try in either half up to that point.

Ford, pleased with his team's efforts in defence, was unhappy with some of their attacking manoeuvres, despite the scoreline - but he shared the responsibility, having set his troops up with a game-plan to practise "wet weather rugby" even though it was a relatively dry day.

Ford explained: "I saw some stuff in good ball that I was not happy with. Some of that is down to me and how I set the team up.

"I was expecting us to be a bit scratchy with the ball. We changed how we normally play a little bit because of the conditions we're likely to face at the start of the season, which is different to later on in the summer.

"We're looking at playing some wet weather rugby in readiness for the start of the season. We knew it would be drier (for this match) but we wanted to practise that and we didn't do it as well as I would have liked. We wanted to see how that looked."