A LOOK at Friday night’s match stats reveals more about just how much Warrington Wolves struggled against Salford Red Devils.

The 25-14 defeat at The Halliwell Jones Stadium was The Wire’s third in a row in all competitions as they found a 19-0 half-time deficit too much to come back from.

We’ve taken a look at the stats from the game to pick out a few areas that proved costly…

Macdonald and Lafai cause chaos

Warrington will have known beforehand
of the threats Salford’s powerful centres Tim Lafai and Nene Macdonald posed.

However, knowing about it and stopping it are two very different things and both caused carnage again.

Rather than being tied to edges, both players had the freedom to roam and drift to where they felt they could influence things best.

Lafai busted 15 tackles – the rest of the Salford team combined broke through 19 – and came up with two crucial interceptions to turn defence into attack. In total, he made 151 metres with the ball from 17 carries.

Macdonald went a few better, averaging more than 10 metres per carry and totalling 183 metres in his try-scoring display as well as throwing three offloads.

They were not on their own, either, with Wire failing to keep a lid on the Salford back five.

Ethan Ryan (191), Deon Cross (180) and Chris Hankinson (177) all comfortably made three figures, with the Red Devils outside backs sharing the load more adequately.

Wire’s back five actually made marginally more ground on average than their adversaries (9.33m per carry compared to 9.28m) but of their combined metreage of 747m, 499 of those came courtesy of Matt Dufty (298m) and Matty Ashton (201m).

No other Warrington player reached three figures – the next-best figure was Toby King’s 95.

Through rather than round

In his post-match press conference, Paul Rowley said that as well as showing they could catch Wire on the edges – which they did – they wanted to show they could dominate in contact, too.

They certainly did that, with the Red Devils winning collisions and rucks pretty much all evening.

Combined, Salford’s players made 573 metres post-contact compared to Warrington’s 499 and also broke through 36 tackles to Wire’s 30.

Their players averaged just over eight metres per carry, with Wire’s figure just below at 7.8m.

Wire’s attack falters

It is incredible to think Salford managed to build a decisive half-time lead without really having any good-ball territory, with all three of their first-half tries coming from deep.

Across the 80 minutes, they had just 10 play-the-balls inside the Warrington 20 but still managed to run out comfortable winners.

Wire had twice that figure, with most of their 22 play-the-balls inside Salford’s 20 coming after half time, but their George Williams-less attack never really carried much threat.