WARRIORS director of rugby Dean Ryan felt his side had worked hard in Saturday’s 25-5 victory against Doncaster Knights at Sixways.

Despite having a wind advantage in the first-half, Warriors were starved of possession for long periods and led only 5-0 at the break.

“For the first 40 minutes we didn’t touch the ball and, when we did, we got a little bit frantic and knocked it on,” said Ryan.

“It was a strange game because you don’t normally come across what happened in the first-half.

“Doncaster came out with a specific tac - tic and it was very difficult to know how to get the ball off them.

“They had a multi-phase game which went nowhere and it became very difficult to know what else to do other than stay clean and wait until they handed the ball back to us.

“They are an enormous side, even by Premiership standards, but they chose not to move around and it was a straight- on collision.

“In the second-half we got more ball and we started to show what we are capable of doing.

“We probably lacked being clinical with our finishing because we left five or six tries out there in a game we really needed to nail down.”

He added: “The game was up for grabs at half-time but I thought the second-half approach we took and the courage we showed to play from deep paid dividends in the end.

“It took a lot of people being on script and buying into everything and we had to work really hard to get that final 20 minutes.

“We knew that if we could get multi- phase, we knew that we had individuals who could stretch them but we just did not have the ball in the first-half.

“We never felt stressed by their attack – the only stress was their multi-phase and inviting us to make a mistake so I think we did a great job not to get sucked into that.”

Doncaster’s director of rugby Clive Griffiths was pleased with his side’s showing for much of the match.

“I can’t fault my guys for guts and determination – Worcester got behind us a few times but we scrambled back and knocked people off,” he said.

“We knew it was going to be tough and we would need everything to go right to stand any chance of getting something from the game.

“I thought our scrum was magnificent and for sheer doggedness we didn’t look like a team who chucked the towel in.

“We had to keep the ball in the first-half because there was a very strong wind down the pitch – that was the idea to frustrate Worcester and we did that for long periods of the game.”

He added: “When you go down to 14 men, a good side will punish you and they did that quite considerably with three tries.

We were the architects of our own down - fall. Bevon Armitage took the law into his own hands, got caught and hurt the boys left out on the field.”

Griffiths added: “We are tough to beat.”