Woolford impressed with Sezer and Gaskell combination

Simon Woolford has expressed his delight with the progress of new halfback partners Lee Gaskell and Aidan Sezer.

28-year-old Sezer arrived at the club last month fresh from leading Canberra Raiders to their first Grand Final in 25 years.

Wednesday night’s friendly win over Wakefield was the first time the pair have played together and the Giants boss was impressed with their performance.

“They’ve looked really good in training, so I think that combination will just get better and better,” he said. “Looking at them tonight there’s enough there to see that they’re going to be pretty exciting throughout the year and will complement each other well.

“I thought Adam O’Brien was really good too. He played really well (last week) against Halifax and he was outstanding again tonight too.

“And Ash (Golding), of course. He’s got some sort of hamstring injury and will be missing for a little while, but the more they all play together the better they’ll get.”

The Giants were kept scoreless in the second half on Wednesday but only conceded once themselves, in the 79^th minute.

They defended several sets on their own line, thwarting almost every Wakefield attempt to cross the whitewash, which Woolford says was down to their work on the training field.

“We spent a lot of work in pre-season on our defence and it was up there with the best it’s been since I’ve been here,” he added. “It was good to see the hard work we’ve put in over the past three or four months was translated onto the field against quality opposition.

“There were a number of times in the first half where we kept them inside their own 30m, so they were kicking from poor positions and our outside backs were catching the ball on halfway.

“You look at last year, that was us. We were getting held into our own 30m and we lost that field position battle a lot.

“Obviously we made some errors in the second half but that happens in these sort of trials and are easy to fix. I said to the guys after the game ‘At least tomorrow we won’t have to talk about lack of effort’.

“We need to bottle that effort we had tonight because that’s what’s going to win us games this year.”