Barrow Raiders head coach Paul Crarey believes his side allowed a few try-scoring chances to slip away during their 24-16 victory over North Wales Crusaders in their latest pre-season friendly.

Crarey’s son Joe was one of four try scorers for the Raiders at Craven Park, but it was their only one of a disjointed second half that the Crusaders finished the stronger.

However, Crarey was more satisfied with how Barrow performed during the first half, which they largely controlled and could have gone into half-time more than 18-4 ahead, given how many sets they went through.

Overall, however, he felt they were able to build on the previous week’s narrow loss against Oldham and is now looking for that extra sharpness to develop by the time the campaign gets under way for real in the Challenge Cup next month.

Crarey said: “I thought we were good in the first half. We had a 100 per cent completion rate for the whole half, which was really good, and we scored some brilliant tries.

“We talked about not kicking the ball that well in the first half and we carried that into the second half - Adam [Ford] on the right kicked the ball dead in goal, then we gave a penalty away and allowed them field position.

“We’ve talked about finishing well at the back end of sets and we probably didn’t do that right throughout the game.

“Disruption kills you and we were changing around 21 players right through the game. I thought we left two tries out there where we broke and, for all of my money, they should have been tries and we put the ball down.

“Towards the end of the game, at 24-10 up, I think the game was gone and we sat down a little bit, but you can’t do that at any level.”