Ian Watson of course hasn’t been happy with his side’s recent defeats as the Huddersfield Giants lost to Hull FC and Hull KR.
Watson has explained what he thinks has been going wrong for the Giants recently:
“We’ve had two really poor weeks, we’d been pretty comfortable and happy with where we were before then but these two weeks have knocked us off the rails so to speak.
“We want and need a response. It’s not been good enough the last two weeks.
“It’s just made us focus more on the now rather than looking forward, it’s kind of pulled us all back into check a little bit.
“We didn’t get too carried away anyway but the thing is we had one good season last year and finished in the top four, got to a Challenge Cup final but to be a top team you have to do it every year like a Catalans, like a St Helens, like a Wigan. They do it every year and show a level of consistency.
“We’ve got some of them players who show them traits and a level of consistency and we’ve got others that still show traits of inconsistency. That’s where we are.
“You look at some of our performances earlier on in the year and then look at the last two and the last two have been nowhere near where we’ve been before, that comes down to a level of inconsistency.”
He also addressed whether the media’s expectations have had an impact on his side:
“You kind of like expectation, challenging teams to be better is a good thing and that’s what we wanted to be, where we want to be and what our aim is.
“It probably doesn’t help with younger players because they have one good year and they kind of believe the hype and that they’re better than they are, whereas the only reason they got to where they got last year is because they bought into working hard for each other.
“They did that day in day out, this is a different team than last year and everybody is still saying ‘oh it’s one of the best squads’ and I do believe that we’ve got a good strong squad, probably one of the strongest squads but in lots of areas it’s still unproven.
“You’re not filling it out like a St Helens’ squad that has been there year in year out, these players are learning to deal with that level of pressure and expectation.
“For St Helens that level of expectation and pressure is there every year, that’s a different level of pressure. You have some teams near the bottom end of the table who have the pressure of relegation every year.
“At Huddersfield we’ve gone from kind of a bottom four team to all of a sudden having one good year and then the next year everyone is telling players that they’re going to win the competition. It’s not going to just happen by talking about it, it happens by hard work and going and getting it.
“That’s probably the bit we’ve lacked, we just thought that because we’d beat Catalans at home and we were in a good spot so it’s like we just thought ‘well we’ve got Hull now and they’ve lost seven games’, we turned up undercooked and didn’t perform at the right level.
“We then go to Hull KR and we turn up with a performance that lacks effort and energy. I know it was terrible conditions but we spoke as a group that we felt we lacked certain strengths of ours.”
After saying his side need to leave the egos aside after defeat to Hull KR, he revealed conversations with individuals:
“We’ve got to change the momentum and strip it back this week where it’s just about looking at Leigh and Leigh only, not focusing on anything else because what we’ve proven over the last couple of weeks is that we’re not good enough to look further ahead at the moment.”
