Francis Cummins admits the Bulls deserve to be languishing in the lower reaches of Super League.

Bradford sit 11th ahead of Sunday's trip to Hull KR after failing to win any of their past five games in the competition.

A Challenge Cup victory at Halifax at least lifted some of the gloom but assistant boss Cummins is under no illusions about his side’s current status.

With play-off hopes slipping steadily away, the need for two points has never been greater.

He said: “The kind of mistakes we’re making indicate the sort of band we’re in at the moment. This is lower-league stuff.

“We’re not trying any less than other teams. In fact, we’re probably working harder because there’s a lot of stuff we’re not doing right.

“This is where you are and you need to keep working hard but hopefully become a little bit more efficient in other areas, particularly with the ball.

“Then you start to gain confidence. You might have to win ugly for a little while and then it can go the other way.”

Despite getting the right result at Halifax, the Bulls delivered another performance that fell way below expected standards.

Improvements in attack offered a shred of encouragement but it was the points-against column that proved particularly alarming.

Bradford surrendered 34 points to a part-time team currently struggling near the bottom of the Championship, continuing a trend that has seen them concede 420 points in 13 Super League games.

Cummins has been concerned with levels of concentration and confidence and compared the situation to “spinning plates”.

He said: “When we went near what we practised, we delivered what we did and people knew what they were doing, we looked good.

“When we went away from it a little bit and concentration became a problem, we suffered.

“We need to keep going with it and it’s just stringing it together. Sometimes it’s like spinning plates – when you get one thing right, something else goes wrong and it’s difficult to explain to people at times.

“It’s not like learning your times table and once you get it, that’s it.

“There are all kinds of factors, like fatigue, calls against you or trying too hard. Sometimes you make an error and you go away from your systems trying to make up for it on your own.

“It’s about confidence, it’s about experience and it’s about sticking to what we do in training.

“If we stick to what we do in training then you don’t have to go over and above and try even harder, which may leave a gap somewhere else.

“It’s about continually testing them in training, whether it’s a conditioned game or under fatigue, and hopefully it will start to produce results.”

Cummins believes the Bulls will benefit more than most from seeing the back of a tough Easter period.

A gruelling run of four games in 16 days left little time for extensive game preparation – not ideal for a team still attempting to form combinations.

Aside from a high turnover of players ahead of the campaign, injuries mean the Bulls have only been able to field an unchanged team in back-to-back games once so far.

“We’ve had to be careful about what we’ve done over Easter but there are more things we can do now we’re out of that period,” said Cummins.

“It’s a matter of players buying into what we’re doing and concentration. Like I said, there are a lot of factors that feed into that, and confidence is a massive one.

“You need preparation. That’s a big thing too.

“If you’re not quite prepared or don’t have time to do things then you can become unstuck.

“If you have a squad like ours, which is young, new and still trying to find their combinations, they’ve got nothing really to fall back on.

“It helps but I’m not holding excuses up here. We just need to be better, and that’s players and coaches. We’re all in this together.”