Ian Watson slams “ridiculous” rule

Ian Watson wasn’t happy after his side’s defeat to St Helens with Huddersfield Giants battling with the likes of Leeds Rhinos, Hull FC, Hull KR and Salford Red Devils for a spot in the play-offs.

They needed some luck for their clash with Super League and World Champions St Helens last week but came up short against them.

It didn’t help that they were down to 11 men at one stage with Matty English sin binned before Joe Greenwood was sent off.

Watson of course spoke about these incidents but he also questioned the six again rule and he slammed it again this week:

“We’ve sent a message and we’ve received an email back just talking about the incident and a few other things that went on in that game that we weren’t quite happy with, obviously I spoke out after the game about the six again rule on the first tackle, which I just think is a ridiculous rule.

“In the NRL, it’s a penalty, and there’s no deterrent in this competition for you to just pile four men in and lie on in that first tackle, but then you get a completely set defensive line so you can organise your defence and make sure you can read what they’re doing in attack.

“There’s no advantage, it slows the game down, it’s not what the six-again rule was made to do. Whereas in the NRL, you do that on the first tackle, you get a penalty against you, you’re now defending your goal line. There’s a deterrent in there in the NRL, whereas there’s not one in the Super League for that. It 100% needs looking at that rule for me.”

Watson was pleased with some aspects of the game:

“Yeah, we spoke about how we wanted to start, we didn’t do that and we gave St Helens a real leg up and that just rocked us for a little bit.

“Once we started to tidy up a couple of little things we started to get a little bit of a feel for the game and we started to complete a few sets and build a little bit of pressure then. Obviously the sending off happened, but the one big thing that passed on there was kind of the way the boys reacted for each other and the work ethic and they stuck true to what we asked them to do.

“Even the attack, there was a man down in the attack, but we were able to open up St Helens a few times on the back end of it. So yeah, there was a lot of positives. The biggest one being the desire and the amount of commitment that the players showed while they were down to 12 men really.

“But like I say, we probably shouldn’t have been in that position. I felt we were just starting to get a little bit of a fall back in the game at that point as well, because we’ve rectified what we’ve done wrong at the start of the game.”