YORK Knights boss Andrew Henderson has apologised to fans after what he deemed an “embarrassing” performance against Whitehaven.

The Knights were looking for back-to-back wins at the LNER Community Stadium, but instead produced an abject and underwhelming display that saw them fail to come close to closing down the 36-point lead the Cumbrians had amassed.

Joe Brown, Jimmy Keinhorst and Tom Lineham did provide some late cheer in a blistering 11-minute spell, but the irreversible damage had already been done well before then as they fell to a 36-16 defeat in the first of a run of three consecutive home games.

“I’ll be brutally honest, I’m embarrassed today as a coach,” Henderson fumed. “I’m embarrassed.

“That performance is not a York Knights performance and I want to publicly apologise to the fans for that display because it was unacceptable.

“What certain individuals dished up today was far from good enough, and it’s really, really hurtful is that one.

“I’m always quick to try and find the positives, but it’s really hard to find that today. I felt that too many players were just way off it.”

The head coach admitted that the performance had come out of the blue to him after what he felt had been a positive week on the training pitch after last weekend’s defeat at Batley.

He continued: “It’s probably a cliche, and you probably hear lots of coaches say ‘we had a great week at training’, but we did actually have a good week at training.

“It’s not something we saw coming, and I’d be honest enough to say that I saw this coming today. I didn’t see it coming.

“I thought the way we responded through the week after that narrow loss to Batley was really encouraging, but then to come out and dish up that today, I just don’t know where that’s come from.

“I’m really, really disappointed by that.”