After the drama at Wembley between Leigh Leopards and Hull KR, we turn to Super League today as Huddersfield Giants head over to Champions St Helens in a postponed Round One fixture.
The team news is now in and there is a very big name left out for the Giants in the shape of Theo Fages.
The French star and former St Helens and Salford Red Devils man doesn’t feature with Olly Russell instead at seven.
Now Fages has been struggling with injuries lately but he was named in the 21 man squad.
Interestingly, it was confirmed this week that Fages was set to leave the club at the end of the year to join Catalans Dragons.
As for St Helens, they welcome back Joe Batchelor and Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook.
There is still no Jon Bennison.
The Saints have lost Curtis Sironen and Will Hopoate unfortunately.
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.”
