Nathan Brown's column: We’ll miss all of the players are leaving us

Sep 10 2009 by Chris Roberts, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Nathan Brown and Liam Fulton

Paul Jackson and Liam Fulton are both leaving the club at the end of the season. How tough were those decisions to take?

It’s never good when a player has to leave, and it was no exception when it came to Paul and Liam, or the other members of our squad who are leaving, for that matter.

But the circumstances of the departures of the two you’ve mentioned are somewhat different.

In the case of Liam, the agreement was for him to come over on loan for a six-month period and then look to return to resume his career in the Australian NRL with Wests Tigers, and that’s the way it’s panned out.

However, it’s obviously still a shame to be losing a player of this quality, but it’s something we’ve always been aware of and we wish him well.

I think it’s fair to say Liam’s been good for the Giants, and the Giants have been good for Liam.

Jacko, unfortunately, has been a victim of the salary-cap rules that are in place in Super League. I’m afraid that’s the way of the world.

But there’s no doubt he’s been a great servant to the club and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with him.

And as well as losing a very solid player, we’ll be losing a good person who has always shown 100% commitment to the club.

I know that whatever happens with Jacko in the future he’ll continue to give everything to the game he loves.

Moving on to current matters, how pleased were you with the response of the players at Celtic Crusaders to their Challenge Cup final defeat the week before?

It definitely helped to blow away a few cobwebs.

The performance was up and down. We were guilty of playing in patches.

We changed a fair amount of personnel for the game and we went to South Wales after a week when we were obviously down a bit in training because of the events of the previous Saturday.

So I think you could say we did what we had to do to get the result, and we’ve got to be fairly happy with that.

We were able to build up a solid lead at half-time (18-0) and then we challenged the players at half-time to continue to build on that, which they did in the early stages of the second half (the lead was up to 36-0 after 52 minutes).

It goes without saying we were a little disappointed with the way we finished the game but, overall, it was just good to get the win.

And even though the Crusaders were without six of their players because of their visa violations and a few others were out through injury, they didn’t make it easy, did they?

I thought they tried really hard and didn’t make it easy for us at all.

They’re obviously a great bunch of blokes and their coach is doing a great job.

As I said, they were lacking at least eight of their top 13 players, and any club, including the top teams, would find it very difficult trying to compete strongly on the back of that sort of statistic, so I think they deserve to take a great deal of credit.

But, at the same time, we all know Wigan will be much tougher at the Galpharm on Sunday.