JIMMY Lowes has hit out at the critics who have written his team off before the new season has even started.

Entering his first full year as Wolves head coach, Lowes is charged with turning perennial underachievers into genuine Super League title contenders.

But with two months still remaining until the start of the campaign, the Yorkshireman’s ability has already been questioned by some observers, one bookmaker making him 4/1 favourite to become the first Super League head coach sacked.

Lowes dismissed the negative sentiment though and remains confident both in his own ability and that of his players to bring success to the Halliwell Jones.

He said: “I’m not bothered by it and I never have been.

“I’m confident we can do well this year and I’m confident I’m working hard enough to prevent a bad situation from happening.

“It’s just very disappointing that people are looking for the negatives straight away.

“I’m not worried about what some of the pundits say, they don’t know enough, they’ve started guessing and assuming already.

“That happens in sport but it’s quite sad at this time of year, when we’re going into a season of non-relegation in Super League, they’re still running stories about people getting sacked.

“We’ve got to knuckle down and get on with it and not worry about whose head’s on the chopping block.”

Assuming full control of pre-season preparations for the first time, Lowes has been putting the majority of the Wolves squad through their paces over the past month.

Several key players are nearing a return to action and Lowes is confident the squad is now better equipped to deal with any potential pitfalls, mainly thanks to the accelerated development of the club’s younger players.

He added: “You try your best to prepare your body and that’s what pre-season’s for. It’s a high impact sport and high impact sports do produce injuries.

“What you’re trying to do is put a squad together that can cope with that and we were just unfortunate last year that a lot of our injuries were bad long-term injuries.

“We saw no light at the end of the tunnel and had to start playing the younger lads who’ve not played a lot of rugby at Super League level.

“Usually you try and drip feed them, you try and put them in for a few games and then bring them out again, that’s how they adapt.

“But we just had to sling them all in at the deep end and they got bruised and battered, although that could help us now because they’ll be better prepared this season.

“We try everything in prevention of long-term injuries but we play a high-impact sport and it’s inevitable that we’ll get some injuries, we just need to deal with them better.”