Nathan Brown column: Youngsters prove Giants future is looking bright
May 14 2009 by Chris Roberts, Huddersfield Daily Examiner
What were your overall impressions of Sunday’s Challenge Cup win over Rochdale Hornets?
We were obviously pleased to have got through, which was the main objective.
But what was also very good was that this game gave us the opportunity to give some of the younger people an opportunity – the players who haven’t played for the first team at all or have played just one or two games.
The likes of Josh Griffin, Larne Patrick and Keal Carlile were given their chance and will have benefited greatly from the experience.
Obviously, they were helped by the fact that they had some experienced players around them, which was important.
And I think they will all have acknowledged that the Cup tie was nowhere near as physical or intense as a Super League game.
But it really was good to give them a chance, and we did enough to get the win against a Rochdale side who tried hard throughout the game.
I think they (Rochdale) felt pretty good about themselves at the end of the game, which was good.
Paul Jackson led the team out at the weekend, so was he the captain for the day?
It was a role shared by Jacko and Eorl Crabtree, dependent on who was on the field at the time.
They are both members of the leadership group, which is a group nominated by the players at the start of the season.
Obviously, because Brett Hodgson was rested, we needed to make the change of captaincy and, once again, the players put forward their nominations from the group, and Jacko and Eorl got the nod.
I was more than happy with that, and for Jacko it was a reward for all the hard work he puts in on such a regular basis.
As everyone now knows, the reward for beating the Hornets is a home quarter-final tie against Castleford. Have you given that game much thought?
Not really.
The Castleford tie comes at the end of a big three-week period for ourselves.
Before then, we’ve got Sunday’s home game against Salford and then the match at Wakefield, which can further help us cement our place in the top four.
That’s when we can think about Castleford and trying to push on in the Challenge Cup.
We’ve got to put than to the back of our minds.
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