JOHN Kear was glad Bulls avoided a couple of serious injuries yesterday, but they were about the only positives he was able to take from an awful performance in the 44-0 Championship defeat at Featherstone.

Ebon Scurr was down in back field for a long time and was stretchered off wearing a neck brace, before being treated by paramedics.

Meanwhile, Ben Evans hobbled off in agony early on, but fears he had broken his leg proved unfounded.

A relieved Kear said: "The medical staff did a wonderful job with Ebon, and there was real concern initially, but all the protocols were followed, the hospital scanned him, and basically the diagnosis is he's okay.

"He'll have a sore neck for a few days, but there's no serious damage.

"We thought Ben Evans had broken his leg, as he was in a fair bit of pain, but fortunately the medical staff got that wrong.

"He's still very sore but he's recovering and is okay.

"We didn't have a good day performance wise, so add in all those circumstances and it was a really bad day at the office."

Kear pulled no punches in his assessment of the performance, drawing parallels with the disastrous opening day defeat at Sheffield.

He said: "We played very poorly and our performance was as bad if not worse than the Sheffield one.

"We've had a couple of horror shows now amid a very good start to the season, so we need to eliminate those.

"We can have a really in-depth inquest with no game this coming weekend, because we can't just write this off and accept it as a one-off.

"We've got to identify why this happened. I've got my own theories and I'll run them by the players to see if they agree or what they can come up with."

Kear added: "After a game like that though, I would have liked to play again straight away, as when you fall off the horse, it's good to get straight back on it and conquer all your fears.

"But it doesn't matter about what I prefer, the fact is we can't go to France to play Toulouse."

Bulls were missing a lot of players for yesterday's defeat after a particularly unlucky week, and Kear said: "Obviously we had the four loan players, then have had three recalled, but their parent clubs had every right to do that.

"That reduced our strength in depth and then we had Aaron Murphy and Dan Fleming self-isolating so we were down on troops.

"But that's no excuse because the team we sent out was still a competitive one on paper, they just didn't perform."

Asked if the defeat had only exacerbated the need to bring in some reinforcements ahead of Bulls' next game against Widnes in a fortnight, Kear said: "We're well down the track with one player coming in, so hopefully there should be at least one but there may well be others.

"It'll be a tough game against Widnes and we'll certainly have to be at our best because they took Featherstone close last week (a 24-18 defeat in the 1895 Cup semi-final) and we didn't even scare them yesterday.

"We've a lot of improvement to do for that game in a couple of weeks."