JAMES FORD insisted that “the supporters and club deserve better” than the performance produced by York City Knights in a dismal 37-12 defeat at Whitehaven.

York fell to a fourth straight defeat in the Betfred Championship after another error-strewn and ill-disciplined display.

The result saw the Knights drop to ninth place, and, for the second time in three weeks, head coach Ford apologised to the fans afterwards.

“We won’t be brushing over this, we never do, and we’ll aim at being a lot better than that because the supporters and club deserve better,” he said.

“I will apologise to the supporters (because) I’m really disappointed with what we’ve served up.

“We have got to stick together and fight our way through this. We need to be better, make sure we get more out of this team and more out of one another.

“We don’t want our supporters to be going home feeling let down, we want to send them to work on a Monday over the moon.

“Everybody has had a difficult year and a half, and we want to bring joy to our supporters and for them to be proud of us.

“The only way to do that is to address the issues that we consistently serve up and being better at our jobs.”

Individual mistakes, whether through handling or giving away penalties, proved again costly for the Knights.

“Our start was poor, we put ourselves under an awful lot of pressure and we weren’t strong enough mentally to deal with it,” Ford said.

“At half time, we thought we had the answers, and we started fairly well, and again our errors killed our momentum and pumped up Whitehaven.

“It’s been a very similar story on a number of occasions this year where we’ve made too many errors or given too many penalties away and it has impacted on our energy, defensive performance and ability to move the ball.

“Individually, we need to be better, we need to stop making mistakes and giving penalties away. We need to do our jobs better than we are doing at the minute.”