MICHAEL Lawrence has pulled no punches in assessing Bulls’ 32-16 defeat at York on Monday in the Betfred Championship, the skipper admitting that the side’s approach and attitude to the game was unacceptable.

However, the former Super League star says the players have already held themselves accountable and have vowed as a collective to put things right at home in round three against Widnes on Sunday.

He told the T&A: “I think our mentality was wrong going into the York game.

“We seemed to want to do the pretty stuff before putting in the hard work first.

“York did the basics right, defending well and making strong carries, and they beat us on energy as much as anything.

“They only scored four tries to our three, but they deserved to win.

“We dropped the ball eight times on the first tackle and completed at around 60 per cent, and you can’t be doing that if you want to win games of rugby league.”

Bulls looked dangerous in the first half when they did get the ball out wide, but prop forward Lawrence insisted: “You’ve always got to earn the right to go wide.

“You get that by building up ruck speed in the middle and making good metres.

“We have dangerous players on the edges in Kieran Gill, Dave Foggin-Johnston, Joe Arundel and Ben Blackmore, and we want to exploit that.

“But York got on top in the middle and we’re really disappointed with that.

“We all said straight after the game that we wanted to go back out and replay it the next day.

“We’ve all held ourselves accountable for that display and we’re all eager to put it right against Widnes.

“We want the performance on Sunday to be what’s expected of us, and to try and put one in that’s worthy of a Bradford side.”

Lawrence faced similar challenges to this during his long spell at Huddersfield, and said: “I’ve been playing in rugby league for 17 seasons now, so I’ve been through most situations.

“I’ve been involved in other games like the York one where we’ve shown bad mentality as a team, and you get found out.

“Against any team in the Championship pretty much, you have to do the hard work before putting points on the board.

“We missed that bit out at York, as we didn’t have enough ball control and made about 20 errors.

“We’ve got a lot of experience in the squad though, so there’s no panic given we’ve got 25 rounds left.

“But it’s about showing a response to the York defeat on Sunday now.”

Influential half-back Tom Gilmore will be out injured for Widnes this weekend but Lawrence knows Bulls cannot focus on that, having made that mistake the other day.

He said: “We need to not look at the make-up of the other side.

“We fell into that trap against York, seeing they had maybe six key first-team players missing.

“You can’t take any result for granted, regardless of who the opposition have in their squad.

“Two things I’m big on are respecting all opposition and making sure we concentrate on ourselves, not what the other team looks like, so we need to do both on Sunday.”