St Helens suffer huge blow Paul Wellens confirms

Yes all the focus was on Leigh Leopards and Hull KR but as St Helens try and hunt down Wigan Warriors, Catalans Dragons and of course the Leopards in the top three their game against Huddersfield Giants today is mightily important.

It is key as well for the Giants who are battling with Hull FC, Leeds Rhinos and those already in the top six for a spot in the play-offs.

However, as these two teams meet in a Round One clash postponed because of St Helens’ Challenge Cup Final commitments, the Saints have confirmed some huge injury news.

Paul Wellens confirmed the news on Saints TV.

He said of Will Hopoate’s hamstring injury: “Yeah, so Will’s going to be probably four to six weeks. It’s obviously a frustrating one for him.

“What many people won’t know is that Will’s been playing for a number of weeks now with a knee that needed a clean-out on it. So what this has done as a forward is the opportunity to get that done as well.

“So hopefully we can heal two things in the same time frame, with it being his knee and his hamstring. I know that Will is very keen to get back fit and finish the season strong with us.

“We’ll do everything we can to put him in a position to do that because he’s shown so many times that even though he misses a few weeks, he can come back and every time he’s come back, he’s always looked like he’s never been away. So we have every confidence in him that he can be a big part of what we’re trying to achieve at the end of the year.”

Meanwhile Curtis Sironen has a problem: “With Curtis, again, it’s very similar. He’s suffered a reoccurrence of an injury.

“Behind the scenes as a club and performance staff, coaching staff, medical staff, we’re working really hard to try and figure out why we’ve had more of those types of injuries this year and also recurrences of those injuries.

“What we don’t do though is point the finger of blame at anybody. It’s important that we look at our own programmes and how we can better put our players in a position so these injuries, A, first don’t happen, but if they do happen then we don’t get recurrences. So we’re working hard at trying to solve that problem.”

That being said there is some good news for the Saints with Louis McCarthy-Scarsbrook, Jon Bennison and Joe Batchelor all potentially back:

“All three are a chance of playing this week. All three have trained with us today. We’re going to monitor the response over the next 24 hours.

“With where the squad is at the moment and I’ve said this to a number of teams but what particularly matters more now is that we’re not taking risks with players.

“We’re not taking risks with Joe Batchelor, we’re not taking risks with Louis or Jon Bennison.

“We are a team that’s looking towards the back end of the year and whilst we are that, we know the importance of still picking up results and still getting the points in the bag that we need to secure our place in the final to the back end of the year, so there’s a real balancing act there.

“We are confident at this moment in time that we’ll at least have two out of three of those bloke back.”