The Bulls are ready to kick-start their season.

After a stuttering start to the campaign, Bradford broke their duck with victory against Castleford on Friday to lift themselves off the foot of the Super League table.

An encouraging performance, as much as the result, provided evidence of the potential which had been largely absent during the previous week’s defeat to St Helens.

And centre Paul Sykes is confident it will signal the start of a charge up the standings.

He said: “All the boys are happy now, we’re off the mark and the only way is up.

“We’re just going to try and put together as many wins as possible.

“It’s good that we had a quick turnaround from last week’s disappointment because we wanted to get straight out there and show that we can play a bit of football and we can win games.”

Sykes scored the final try in a 41-22 triumph against the Tigers, rounding off a performance in which the whole back-line impressed.

But the England Test star was quick to hail the Bulls pack, whose hard graft opened up opportunities for the backs to exploit.

Sykes said: “We have been working on a bit of ball control and knocking the sets out, and it paid off. You can grind your opponents down by doing that.

“We said that we just needed to be a little bit patient. We don’t have to score on every play, it’ll come.”

“The big boys did us proud on Friday. Us backs did our graft as well.

“We spoke about sharing the workload out and it would come a lot better. We certainly did that and we put some nice tries together.”

But Sykes insists there is still plenty of improvement, particularly on defence, after the Bulls conceded four tries, three of them coming from kicks.

He said: “They scored two or three of their tries off kicks so it shows our defence holds up all right, we just need to take care of those kicks.

“If you score more tries than them it’s all right but we will be working on our defence and looking at those conceded tries in the video to fix things up.”