York City Knights returned to action after their shock win over Leigh with a 40-10 defeat at Sheffield Eagles in their second Northern Rail Cup game.

The Championship side scored eight tries, with Wayne Reittie and Lee Waterman crossing for the Knights.

"The performance we put in was quite disappointing," Knights assistant coach Mick Ramsden told BBC Radio York.

"Sheffield have got some really strong players, we seemed to struggle in the tackle to match them for strength."

The Knights trailed only 8-6 at half-time but a series of tries after the break ended hopes of even a bonus point.

We don't want to be too negative from this performance, we've just got to learn from it and push on Mick Ramsden

"Performing not too well, we knew we had a few more gears to go up in the second-half. Unfortunately we seemed to drop a couple of gears," Ramsden added.

"Our biggest strength from last week was our defence, and it's let us down today. We certainly didn't have the enthusiasm and commitment that we had last week.

"I think that Sheffield are a better team than Leigh, and we just couldn't make that step up this week.

"We looked at the stats at half-time and we had the ball 15 times, which is a lot less than we would expect. Obviously from that, we were starved of the ball quite a bit.

"Maybe there was a bit of complacency. We can learn from it and in the long run it could be good that this has happened."

The Knights are back in action on Wednesday when they travel to Rochdale to play a re-arranged fixture which was lost to bad weather.

Ramsden added: "There are a few players that did OK in the game last week against Leeds, it could be that we try some other players out.

"We don't want to be too negative from this performance, we've just got to learn from it and push on."

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