
Newcastle Thunder’s Reserve fixture against Hull KR, scheduled for Saturday, June 10 (1pm KO) has been postponed.
A shortage of medical staff on Thunder’s behalf has meant the fixture could not take place and further details regarding a potential rearrangement will be communicated in due course.
Interestingly, Willie Peters complained this week about the reserves game:
“This is the problem with our reserve grade because we don’t have a competition that you play in every week. So then they want to go, if they’re not getting picked, naturally some players want to be in the first team. But if they’re not ready for that, they need to show that they’re ready in another competition.
“That needs to be the reserve grade. If not, then I’ll always, which I’ve done this year, is send players out to championship teams that they play in a really strong competition. So that’s my thoughts on it.
“I just hope we can get that reserve grade sorted because that’s got to be that next level for guys like Phoenix and AJ and people like that.
“So my opinion is, and it has since I’ve sort of seen our youth and reserve grade sort of systems, we need to be playing every week, they need to be playing every week. So there’s a couple of things there.
“Firstly, welfare. These players get paid to play. From a welfare point of view, a lot of players want to play. So if they’re not getting picked and then they don’t play, then therefore their mind starts to wander and they can do other things and they’re not fully engaged in their job because they’re not playing.
“So sometimes they might not play for a few weeks for different things, game gets caught off, they’re forfeited or whatever it may be. So my big thing is why don’t we play every week? Academy, the same thing, it should be playing every week. That’s how you develop.
“That’s the only difference, major difference in the NRL is these guys are playing every single week. So I understand that we don’t have, football’s our number one game over here, forget all that. I know there’s differences around that, but there’s no reason why we can’t put more focus into the reserve group where the players then take it serious to have the right officials at their game in terms of medical staff, in terms of everything that you need to supply to ensure that game is taken serious by the players and it’s every week.”
