Richard Agar believes his Hull side are in good shape ahead of their Challenge Cup semi-final next weekend after they ended they ended Hull KR's recent domination of the East Yorkshire derby with a 44-18 win.

The Black and Whites scored 28 unanswered points in the second half of the 205th meeting between the two to put an end to the Robins' winning run that had stood at three matches.

A total of eight tries, seven of which were scored by graduates of the club's academy, proved enough to earn Agar his first derby win as a coach and set his side up for their clash against Wakefield in seven days' time.

"We've trained with a good attitude and practised really well," he said. "I thought at half-time that when we'd done something good we followed it up with something bad. It was a little bit tit-for-tat.

"But we felt that if we ironed that out that we could win the game and win well. We cut out the errors and took our chances. I thought that Matt Sing's try was a catalyst for us and that once we got the lead we really thrived and buzzed off it."

Agar is set to welcome the injured quartet of Todd Byrne, Garreth Carvell, Adam Dykes and Gareth Raynor back into his side for the Wakefield clash and believes that his players are already focussing on the game.

"When we win, we sing a song, and we sing Old Faithful," he said. "But I've seen it sang with more gusto than I did today. It was fairly muted and that tells me that the players know that they have got a very important seven days ahead of them.

"I'm not big on personal kudos, but this is a big win for our players and our fans. I acknowledge that they had a lot of quality players out, but I thought that we buzzed on the back of some of the good things we did."

Justin Morgan felt that his Hull KR side had a chance to steal the points after leading 18-16 at the break, but pointed to a dip in their form after the interval as to why they were unable to do so.

Tries from Ben Galea, Ben Cockayne and Chaz I'Anson had set Rovers up nicely, only for them to eventually slip to a sixth defeat in seven games.

"There were a lot of unforced errors as usual, poor discipline and a few silly errors from kick offs, letting the ball go out on the full," said Morgan. "There were some tries on the fifth play too and we didn't make them hard enough coming out of their own end.

"We showed some good signs in the first half, we were nervous but I thought that we should have capitalised more on what we created. I thought we looked disjointed at times. At half-time we were quietly confident, but Hull put us to the sword by controlling the tempo of the game.

"We didn't put enough pressure on their kickers."

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