Mike Grady says North Wales Crusaders will look to ‘put things right’ after their heavy home defeat to London Skolars.

The Cru’s League One Shield campaign started abysmally as the Skolars claimed a resounding 40-12 win at the Queensway Stadium.

A sluggish start from the hosts saw them fall 22 points behind in the opening 25 minutes against a side they had beaten convincingly in phase one of the season.

The defeat also saw Crusaders overtaken by the Skolars and Hunslet in the Shield standings and ended their recent run of good form.

And Grady believes his side allowed complacency to creep into their game after a fortnight-long break in fixtures.

He said: “It was probably an understatement to say that we were poor.

“It was a very poor display from ourselves, we just weren’t at the races with anything we did.

“But credit to London. They were very good and came here wanting to do a job on us, which they have done today.

“Possibly it was our attitude and there was a bit of complacency in there. I said earlier in the week that it would be a completely different game than what it was last time and it was obvious that London had done their homework.

“They’d trained hard and have come here and been a lot more enthusiastic than us.

“We were complacent and just not at the races at all in a very poor performance from ourselves.”

The Cru’s next game comes against familiar opposition in the guise of Gloucestershire All Golds, who Grady’s side have faced three times already this season.

And the Cru boss expects to see a much-improved performance to get their pursuit of silverware back on track.

Grady added: “It’s massively important that we put things right in our next game against Gloucestershire.

“We undersold ourselves against London where we weren’t beaten by the better side, just the better side on the day.

“I know we’re capable of much more and that’s the frustrating part.

“I can’t single any one player out, but as a team we just weren’t there. We didn’t do what we practiced in the week and it was just one of those bad days but we will address that this week in training.

“The game is done and dusted now. We’ve got six more games to go, six winnable games at that, so now we put this result to the back of our minds and work hard this week and when we kick on there’s no reason why we can’t reach the Shield final.

“That’s the goal and that’s what we’re aiming for. If we’re going to have a bad performance I’m glad we’ve got it out of the way now and then we kick-on in the coming weeks.”

The defeat to Skolars was compounded by an ankle ligament injury to Dale Bloomfield, while Callum Mulkeen and Jack Houghton also picked up injuries.

Grady confirmed that the trio will be assessed ahead of Saturday’s trip to Gloucestershire.