Featherstone Rovers 28, Leigh Centurions 22 By Mike Hulme

FURIOUS Leigh coach Paul Terzis labelled his team's performance as 'dumb' as they crashed out of the Powergen Challenge Cup at Featherstone.

A grim-faced Terzis said minutes after the final whistle: "We had a lot of dumb players out there playing dumb football."

The Hilton Park boss was also critical of referee Russell Smith who sent six players to the sin-bin - four from Leigh.

"The referee performed as badly as we did," he complained.

All six were yellow carded in a bad tempered second half but the majority were for technical offences. Leigh skipper Adam Bristow was sin-binned twice and was joined in the 'cooler' by Damian Munro and Dave Bradbury.

Leigh started strongly and had an early try on the board through Munro but a Rovers burst of three tries in nine minutes from Ian Brown, Danny Seal and Jamie Stokes pulled thr ug from underneath the Centurions.

Leigh never really recovered from that triple blow and although Lee Sanderson pegged four points back with a couple of penalties, Rovers maintained the edge to lead 16-8 at the break.

Rovers swept down the hill at the start of the second half and effectively decided the game in the first four minutes after the re-start.

Briggs knocked over a field goal, Stuart Dickens added a penalty and when Seal crossed for his second try, Leigh were 19 points adrift.

Dickens punished Leigh's indiscipline again with another penalty and Briggs knocked over another one-pointer before Leigh finally proved that they could play a bit.

In the final 10 minutes Leigh hit full throttle, scoring three times to give Rovers an almighty scare by getting to within a converted try of levelling the scores.

Dale Cardoza scattered two defenders to crash in for the first, full-back David Alstead pushed aside another defender to stretch over and Munro collected his second but Sanderson could only convert one of the tries and in total missed four shots at goal.