Ian Watson explains the reason behind Huddersfield Giants’ disappointing start to the season

To the surprise of many Huddersfield Giants are sat near the bottom of the table after just four wins from their opening nine games.

Their latest defeat game against Hull FC before the international break and after that Giants boss Ian Watson was quick to review what he described as their “worst performance”.

“We came in after the Hull game and obviously reviewed that performance, a couple of days off then we came in at the back end of the week and we’ve trained this week so we’ve had a fairly good preparation if you like,” he said as he explained how the Giants used their time off.

“All the boys have applied themselves very well in training which you would have expected after probably our worst performance of the season at Hull.

“We’ve trained well so onto this week.”

In terms of fixing things up, Watson said: “We look at a hell of a lot of the game and the stats in there, and then what we’ve done over this first third of the season. If you look stats based then we’re really high up but our league position says we’re a bottom four team at the moment.

“It’s all great ticking off boxes in your processes but we need to be picking up wins, it’s about winning now. We did that, we won against Salford, had a tough loss against Leeds, then beat Catalans and then we’ve thrown out our worst performance at Hull FC.

“There’s things we’ve looked at and things we know we need to be better at and we need to be a lot better to handle a Hull KR team that are going really well at this moment in time.

He also explained why it has been so up and down to start the season citing injuries as the main reason:

“I’d say probably the biggest thing is personnel. You miss your big players, you look at the spine of the team and it’s not there. I’ve always said it wherever I’ve coached that if you get a settled spine you’re in a good place and history proves that.

“We did really well last year with handling the loss of certain players and this year we haven’t handled the loss of Theo Fages and Oliver Russell very well, but to be fair they’re your two controlling players.

“We’ve not really got anybody else other than young Rushy who is that controlling player, so we’ve got to deal with what we’ve got and crack on knowing we’ll be better with it as we go further forward.

“The big thing is our effort areas and making sure we don’t get beat on them and I’d say in the game against Hull we got beat in them areas.

“We seemed to have a completely off day where we didn’t value the off the ball efforts as much as we have been doing.

“There’s been some close losses, Wigan, Saints and Leeds. They can go either way but it’s more the Hull performance that’s been the worst one this year.”

That said he did add: “If you look at the stats we’ve not been that bad. But we need the results.”