Huddersfield Giants boss slams club fitness after loss to St Helens as hints made at reshuffle

Huddersfield Giants are ‘drastically underdone’ in terms of their fitness according to head coach Jim Lenihan, with the club’s recently-appointed boss critiquing his side after their loss to St Helens.

St Helens won 36-6 in the sun at the BrewDog Stadium in a game that was far closer than the scoreline suggested but Saints four tries in the final 20 minutes ensured defeat for Huddersfield and highlighted Lenihan’s major gripe about the club’s fitness.

Speaking post-match on Sky Sports, Lenihan admitted that there were signs of improvement, predominantly in the pack and inside the first 60 minutes.

He admitted: “I thought today we did get some improvement, I think, on our game from last week. I think we took on their middle a little bit more. I thought we dragged them down.

“20 minutes into the second half, it’s 16-6, we hit a bit of a red line at the back end there. George (Flanagan) went off with cramp, and then we’ve had a few HIAs to contend with through the game, and then we just probably fell away a little bit.”

That drop-off was marked with clear nerves around the home fans when the scoreline was 16-6 but Huddersfield fell away and it’s that fatigue that Lenihan is keen to work on.

He explained: “I felt the way we started the game, the way we got into our second half, we created the weakness in them and put them under fatigue, and we worked really hard at that and now we’re on the journey of working through our own fatigue and getting better in that space.

“There were certainly some green ticks in there today and there’s certainly some things we’ve got to keep working on, but the contact and the effort that goes into trying to create weaknesses in the other team was really important enough today, and I felt like we did that.”

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Huddersfield Giants’ fatigue costly in loss to St Helens

Defeat today marked the Giants’ 13th loss in 15 Super League games with Lenihan in charge for the last three of those, in all of which Huddersfield have conceded 36 or 38 points.

Though the wait for a win continues, Lenihan has explained that winning is not what matters currently, but instead improving in each and every area, with fitness being a key one.

“I’ve said it before, it doesn’t matter if it’s ten more weeks and we don’t have a win. That’s not the important part to us at the moment,” he exclaimed.

“We’re building a game into us, we’re building a mentality into us, and that’s not going to come quickly, and it doesn’t come by just trying to cheat a quick try here and there.”

On fitness, he said: “I think today we might have had, like, three or four HIAs. We’ve got to work harder at our contact, we’ve got to keep working harder at being fitter. I think we are drastically underdone in our fitness compared to the top sides at the moment, so it’s really hard to pick that up in season, and we’re training harder than we’ve done. We’ve got extra days in our week now to do more.

“The journey is in one direction and it’s only going to go that same way. We’ve just got to keep working harder and keep getting used to it. Give us a month, four weeks, five weeks, we’ll physically start catching up to it.

“We’re going into games fatigued now because of how much we’re working in the season. But, again, it’s not about winning games quickly for us. It’s now about building a mentality and building a game in the way we want to play our game.”

Another key point that Lenihan made was that the club are now full on cap with the Giants boss stating the club will look come the end of the season at the ‘opportunity to shuffle some people out’, hinting that he may well put his own mark on the side in the off-season.

He said: “We’re a full deck now, so nothing’s really going to happen until the end of the year. We are what we are, and when the opportunity comes to shuffle some people out at the end of the year, then that’ll be something that we can look at.”

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