Steve McNamara was delighted to see the old Catalans Dragons identity come back to the fore as they battled to an 11-0 win over Leeds Rhinos.
A drop goal from Luke Keary on the stroke of half time and two tries from Reimis Smith helped the Dragons end their winless start to the 2025 Betfred Super League season on Saturday evening.
It was the attitude shown in defence on a wet and windy night in Perpignan which pleased head coach McNamara the most, though.
- Revealed: Jared Warea-Hargreaves accidentally knocked out team-mate during pre-season training
- RFL advance Salford more money to pay players
- Subscribe to rugbyleaguehub.com on YouTube
“I thought we got our identity back as a team,” McNamara said.
“We want to play attractive rugby league, we want to play with the ball more, score some good tries, make some good breaks.
“But I think we got caught in between on a couple of occasions over the last couple of weeks.
“I thought we got back to having some pretty brutal defence and some pretty strong defence.”
Catalans had managed to keep Betfred Championship side Halifax Panthers scoreless in their 14-0 Betfred Challenge Cup win at The Shay in the third round last month, but then proceeded to lose their first three fixtures of the Super League campaign.
In total, they conceded 76 points in those matches, 34 of which were shipped away to Leigh Leopards in Round 3.
That was something former England boss McNamara, now in his ninth season at the helm of the French outfit, felt was particularly uncharacteristic of his side.
“We lost our identity last week in defence, they were too good for us and we were too soft,” McNamara said.
“We’ve never been like that. To get zero [against Leeds] is really important.”
Picture credit: Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license
