BOSS James Ford says York City Knights will relish their Championship travels as they head into a daunting second half to the season.

The League One champions have shocked the domestic game's second tier so far, beating the odds to sit third after 13 games, with nine victories to their name.

However, eight of those fixtures have been at Bootham Crescent, meaning the bulk of their remaining 14 games will be on the road - nine in total, starting on Saturday when they head to Blackpool for the mid-season Summer Bash. There, their opponents will be one of the teams to have beaten them so far, Featherstone Rovers.

However, Ford said the Knights, having been desperate to get into this division, were looking forward to every test on their travels.

"We prefer to play at home," he conceded, his team having lost only three times in the league at Bootham Crescent since the start of last season. "But it's a challenge and we look forward to challenges.

"We're looking forward to going to some of these tough venues - going to the likes of Leigh Centurions, going to Toronto. We wanted to be in this league.

"They're going to be really tough challenges and they're ones we're really looking forward to."

The Knights had been rank outsiders to get into the play-offs at the start of the season and they remain underdogs to finish in the top five - not helped by the injuries currently in the camp.

Any hopes the fans had of York bolstering their squad by re-signing Australian prop Joel Edwards - a key player in the title run-in last season - have also now been curtailed by the fact he has joined League One big-spenders Newcastle Thunder, ironically the Knights' opponents in the 1895 Cup on June 2.

On whether his team had shocked pundits so far, Ford declared: "I would imagine there would be people outside (the camp) who are surprised. We're just focusing on the group and on each game as it comes.

"As a collective we're just trying to get better each week. We're not really interested whether other people are surprised or not. We don't openly discuss goals or expectations. We're taking it a game at a time and trying to improve with each one."