HE may not have the most glamorous job in the team, but Ilkley flanker Pat Power has attracted praise from the team's head of rugby Rhys Morgan.

Morgan enthused: "I look for consistency in a player and Pat has very few ups and downs.

"He carries strong and he always puts in a consistent amount of tackles. He is very important for us, we are different team without him.

"He combines beautifully with Joe Lowes' aggression and flair and he just gets on with the hard graft and donkey work.

"He's always in there and leading from the front."

Power scored an early try in Ilkley's narrow 17-16 win over lowly Birkenhead Park last Saturday. Morgan refused to be too critical of his side, despite their slightly underwhelming performance.

He argued: "We made more than enough try-scoring opportunities early on and if we'd have put a couple of them to bed, we'd have been okay.

"In the second half we maybe got a bit nervous. The lineout went south and we continued to make some errors.

"But we put in a fantastic defensive performance. We put in something like 200 tackles and missed three in the entire game."

"We didn't quite nail the attack but it's difficult to criticise the team for playing open, fluid rugby when we've been advocating that for the last two weeks (against Preston and Harrogate) and getting a lot of success out of it."

Ilkley have two tricky ties remaining this season, away to Lymm and Kendal, but Morgan hopes that good results in those can push his team up to seventh.

He said: "We would love to finish seventh. We're desperate to send out a message that we're looking to get better and better.

"We're not wanting to just hang on in the division and scrape survival because we want to encourage players to come to us.

"We've had a difficult year given the decisions and availability problems that have gone against us so we're pleased to be in the thick of that battle from seventh to tenth.

"Whatever happens, it's still been a very successful season."