Huddersfield Giants may have beaten Wakefield Trinity on Friday night but they only scored one try.
In a lot of ways this embodied the problem they faced at the end of the year in 2022 but on an extreme scale.
It also explains why the Giants signed Jake Connor.
Speaking after the game on BBC Sport West Yorkshire, he spoke about the impact of Connor comparing him to George Williams:
“I’m pretty confident, we’ve obviously got a player in the stand who everyone knows is pretty good at opening up defences and that’s the main reason he’s here.
“He’s funny, he’ll be looking at that and asking ‘why have we done that or not done this’ and sometimes it’s a case of similar to George Williams where he sees it and picks it, Jake is like that. He sees it and picks it and that’s the little bit of X factor we’re missing at this time. For sheer grittiness though I thought the boys were outstanding.
“He’s back in full training this week coming now. I don’t want to push him too early, he needs some miles under his legs first which he’s started doing with the S&C the last couple of weeks, now it’s about combining it.
“He’s not going to get a pre-season, he’s going to have to build on the run but what we don’t want him to do is be out of breath and be behind.”
When asked if he could be back for the clash with Wigan in Round Five, he said: “it may be, it’ll definitely be in and around there when he’s starting to come back into it as well.
The Giants do have an insanely strong squad as seen by the strength of their reserves this week.
Watson spoke about this: “Ideally you want to be as consistent as you can, probably the spine is the biggest one. This year we’ve got a bit of a late change with Jake coming in. Prycey is trying to find his feet out there, we’ve got Oliver Russell competing for a spot. We just need to build that and see how it takes them but the guys who are performing and we’re winning they’ll be keeping a shirt off the back of that. There’ll be small tweaks.”
