Watson hails 'great' Panthers session

Ian Watson was pleased with the impact of the joint training session with Halifax Panthers today, and saw real value in testing the tactics worked on in pre-season in a competitive environment. The Giants and the Panthers trained together for around two and a half hours, running attack against defence sessions and practicing attacking and defensive shapes at The Shay this morning.

No score was kept, and the Giants Head Coach used the opportunity to see how his team would fare against new opponents after training against themselves for the whole of pre-season so far. With this in mind, he regarded the session as a great success.

"It was more just to get different faces and attack points thrown at us. When you're training against yourselves you know what shapes you're going to throw and you begin to cheat a little bit. This was useful as we had to adapt and think on the fly. It was really good to get something unexpected, especially when you've not seen video of the side beforehand and it's a little unexpected. It was a great session for both teams."

Watson confirmed the squad had got through the session with a clean bill of health, despite a few sore bodies after the first competitive action since the end of the 2020 Super League Season. 

"Injuries wise, it all looks good at the moment. The whole squad will be fully assessed tomorrow and on Monday but more or less everyone looked pretty good. Obviously there's a few niggles and bruises, which is to be expected. Other than that, we've managed pretty well."

Watson was keen to emphasize that the purpose of the session was to look at structures, rather than individuals but was interested to see how his squad would cope in a match situation.

"It was more about the structure that looking at certain individuals. Some people train different to the way they play, so we wanted to see how we'd cope in a match situation. Despite that, we approached it more as a training session game more than anything but Halifax came with a great attitude, which was brilliant and the showed great intensity."

With Huddersfield due to run out next Sunday in their first game of 2021 against Leeds Rhinos, live on OurLeague, Watson indicated that while performance in training would be important in the coming week, he has a good idea at how his side will line up. 

"We'll have a look this week on how we train, but I've got a good idea. It's in my mind how we want to set up."

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