Ian Watson raises short turnaround concern

Huddersfield Giants have been battling Leeds Rhinos, Warrington Wolves, Hull KR and Salford Red Devils and last week they faced a huge game against Leigh Leopards who went into the game fourth in the league.

Before the game, Ian Watson raised questions about the short turn arounds that the Giants have had to deal with.

Then the Giants had to deal with a short turn around from 48 minutes on Friday to 32 minutes on Sunday because of a match abandonment prompting him to raise further questions.

He said on Giants TV: “I thought today was about being a little bit tough, being you against you really, that idea of ‘alright we’ve had a short turnaround, there’s 30 minutes to play, we’re down on a couple of troops’ etc.

“There’s a couple of players who couldn’t play today, Chris Hill, Adam Milner, if they’d have played Friday they would have been able to go back on because the adrenaline was there and they were both saying they were good to go on Friday, but as soon as they come in the changing rooms and take the boots off, that’s it, it’s game over.

“So then obviously you’re down a little bit on troops from that but again you’ve got 30 minutes just to go and have a dig basically and put your hand up and I just thought the way we did it was we did it all disciplined and not the right way to be fair.

“I can’t label that everyone because within the team there’s always different, some that are, some that aren’t kind of thing. You’d like them all to be on it, whether it’s took out some individuals on Friday and they’ve struggled to recover.

“There’s a reason why you don’t play games two days in between and have less than 48 hours to recover. Apparently you’re only supposed to do contact these days for 30 minutes in a week as part of training to allow with all the contacts and concussions.

“So we’ve played a big 50 minutes on Friday and then we’ve had to come back and play an extra 30 odd minutes on the less than 48 hours after. It’s a tough task on both teams to be fair, but again, you can say it’s the same for both teams.”