Watson: We made too many errors to win the game

Huddersfield Giants Head Coach Ian Watson addressed his injury worries as his side were beaten by Hull FC in their opening match of the 2021 season.

Watson found himself without a whole host of players, with the likes of Ashton Golding, Jake Wardle, Joe Wardle, Michael Lawrence and Captain Aidan Sezer missing.

Reflecting on the situation, Watson said “Jake (Wardle) could have played but he has had a couple of issues in pre-season so the other boys have had the work under the belt and done really well in pre-season so that is why we opted for that.

“Joe Wardle is injured. Michael Lawrence got a ‘niggle’ similar to Aidan Sezer but it is round one and there are a lot of games this year quite close together.

“It was not worth someone missing for eight games of the season because we have rushed them out there for week one.”

However, despite missing players, Watson admitted he was nevertheless disappointed with his team on a technical level but is confident they can soon hit back.

“It was our errors and ball control that was disappointing,” He added.

“It ended three tries to two and I thought we defended really well for large periods of the game, especially when we went down to 12 men.

“We looked quite comfortably defensively. We just made two individual bad errors that led to tries but we can tidy them up.

“Otherwise, our system defensively looked good. It was more to do with us losing field position for not respecting the ball enough basically.

“The start of the season is always about processes and getting them right and we are trying to get the boys to understand the different mentality from what they have been used to before.

“That will take time but we have had a good pre-season and we are trying to bed that in and that is what the first few weeks of the season will all be about, to get the systems and belief in what we do will work.”