Bradford Bulls confirm season-ending injury with club down to 15 fit players

Bradford Bulls head coach Kurt Haggerty has confirmed the severity of the club’s injury crisis with one signing now ruled out for the season.

The Bulls lost three players to injury in Saturday’s heavy defeat to Wakefield Trinity with Esan Marsters, Joe Mellor and Jack Ormondroyd all leaving the field injured.

Haggerty has now confirmed that centre Marsters will miss the remainder of the season after snapping his Achilles, a devastating blow for both player and club, whilst the updates on Mellor and Ormondroyd weren’t great either.

Sharing an injury update, Haggerty announced: “Esan Marsters will be out for the season. He’s snapped his Achilles. Joe Mellor is seeing a specialist on Monday and will be out for a long period of time.

“Jack Ormondroyd is 50/50 for the game over the weekend.”

It means Marsters joins fellow centre Waqa Blake on the sidelines with Bradford now short on numbers in their outside backs, as well as in their halves.

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Bradford Bulls set to look at loan market after huge injury crisis

Joe Mellor was the man who had played in the halves at the weekend but the veteran is set for the specialist with Haggerty admitting that ‘it doesn’t look great’ and adding that his expectations from early conversations are ‘six to eight weeks’.

With so many key players out, particularly in the outside backs and halves, Haggerty has confirmed that he does not know what his side could look like on Saturday when the Bulls host Hull KR.

When asked, the Bradford Bulls boss admitted: “I’ll be really honest, I haven’t got a clue right now. We’ve just come off the training field where I had 15 players training. Right now, I don’t really know what it looks like.”

He did concede that the club will have to look at the loan market after having run out of men for their next man up mentality to still be implemented.

“Possibly, yeah,” he said when asked about loans, adding: “It’s something we’ve discussed, something we may need to look at.

“We’re in a situation now where we had a mentality of next man up, there’s no men left, so we’ll keep going. Whatever we’ve got, whoever’s out of position and where they go, I’m sure they’ll all step up and do a job for the club.”