THERE has been a lot of excitement and optimism building within the Bradford fanbase over the past week, following their first victory at Featherstone in nine years.

Despite the current Betfred Championship campaign being only three games in, O’Carroll, who isn’t getting too carried away himself, believes that the supporters have every right to believe in this crop of players.

He said: “That’s the fans’ jobs (to believe and be excited). They pay their hard-earned money to come and watch the games, so it’s important that they enjoy these wins like at Featherstone.

“In terms of myself and the playing group, it’s extremely important that we have a different attitude to that, as we need to remain humble and keep our feet firmly on the ground.

“Like I’ve said previously, despite a very good performance against Featherstone, we have focused on what we can improve on rather than what we’ve done well. That’s the way we’ll always review our games.

“It’s important that we do that because in this game things can change really quickly. If we were to go and lose our next two matches, then things would look a whole lot different.”

O’Carroll added: “One thing that I can assure everyone is that this group will not get carried away because I won’t allow that to happen, as that’s not my personality.

“But I’m happy for the fans because they deserve these types of victories. They’ve had nine difficult years going to Featherstone, so fair play to them if they’re enjoying it and so they should be.”

Reflecting on the display at the Millennium Stadium, O’Carroll said: “It was good. We spoke a lot about backing up the performance from the win against Halifax and I thought we did that for large periods of the game.

“We were disappointed with some areas of our performance, particularly with how we conceded some points.

“The amount of work that we had to do defensively bearing in mind how much pressure we were under, we handled that really well and came through the other side of those spells for the most part. But the way in which we conceded, it left us bitterly disappointed.

“I think our game smarts and game management can be improved on in relation to putting less pressure on our defensive line. That’s something that we need to work on moving forward.”