Huddersfield Giants face Hull KR this weekend knowing that their chances of catching Leeds Rhinos, Warrington Wolves, Salford Red Devils and the Robins themselves in the play off race are all but over.
It is a tough game for the Giants exacerbated by the fact that their game last week was concluded on Sunday after a match abandonment on the Friday night.
Ian Watson has highlighted how this could impact them:
“Ah well it’s taken it down; playing on a Friday you’d normally be able to train again on a Monday, but with playing on the Sunday you can’t train again on the Monday and the Tuesday, you can look to do some light things.
“It has had a knock on affect, but like I say we’ve had a couple of short turnarounds now. It’s more at the back end of this year when it’s coming to a smaller turnarounds like that, it’s more about our energy levels and our enthusiasm and our mentality to go into those games has been competing to cope as well so that’s what we’re relying on.
“There’s not much you can do in training on situations like that, because you’ve had the Friday night game, people have not gone to bed until two o’clock, their waking up, they’re struggling to sleep; and then they’ve got to play again on Sunday, even though it was only 30 odd minutes it’s physically taxing that.
“The day was a completely different day, obviously it was quite warm on Friday, but Sunday was red hot so again you’ve got different conditions and you’ve got different recovery protocols to deal with then on the back end of that.”
Speaking about the run in, Watson said:
“We just said there about a mentality and how we finish and what kind of group we’re going to be going forward. I think we can do a lot of learning from the season and the situations that we’ve been in.
“We spoke a little bit about that at the start of this week about how what’s happened this year can’t happen again. You always want a little bit of luck with injuries and things like that, but in certain situations what we can’t have is the inconsistencies we’ve had this year.
“I know that comes through having a consistent side week in, week out, but I think as a squad, we can be better and we can have a better mentality the way that we approach games, even if we’ve not got the likes of your Theo’s (Theo Fages) and your Jermaine McGillvary’s and people like them going forward. We’ve got to be better than what we have been this year.”
