Nathan Brown column: There are plenty of reasons to be cheerful

Feb 18 2010 by Chris Roberts, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

What’s been the mood like in the camp this week on the back of losing at Hull FC last time out?

As you can imagine, there was initially a feeling of disappointment after the defeat, as there always is.

But, as I said at the time, there was a lot in that performance to be positive about, and many reasons why we should look forward to a good season – and that’s a view shared by everyone within the club.

For a start, our commitment and effort couldn’t be faulted. It was terrific.

And our defence, especially in the second half, was outstanding. Hull look a very good side and to prevent them from crossing our line throughout that second period was highly encouraging.

But clearly our execution wasn’t quite right, and one thing you have to do when you’re playing against a quality side is to make sure you take the chances that come your way.

Overall, though, I think it would be fair to say Hull were a touch better than us in the first half and we were a touch better than them in the second half.

We clearly had enough chances to win the game.

So do you feel you would have won the game if you hadn’t been on the wrong end of some debatable refereeing decisions?

I personally thought the referee (Thierry Alibert) had a fair game.

He refereed the game 50-50 and was consistent with his calls around the ruck and with the offsides.

Obviously, there were some key calls that went against us, and on another day they could have gone in our favour.

But there’s no point dwelling too long on them. They’re out of our control and have gone now.

Yes, it didn’t look as if the pass that put Jamahl Lolesi over in the corner was forward, or there was a knock-on when David Hodgson raced away to ‘score’ or a knock-on when Eorl Crabtree offloaded to Kevin Brown when he had the tryline open.

Rather than reflecting on those, we have to accept the fact that we let ourselves down with our poor execution at times. We need to be smarter.

Those are the areas we need to focus on, because those are the areas that are completely within our control.

The key for us, therefore, is to keep working hard and keep improving. If we do that then we know the calls will start to go in our favour.

How big a loss was Brett Hodgson on the night?

Obviously it had an affect.

He’s our captain and our on-field leader, and there were certain times during the game when we did miss his calming influence.

There were times when we looked a little disjointed, and I’m sure that wouldn’t have been the case had Brett been there. It’s at times like this you look to the other players to take a bit more responsibility, and the fact they didn’t was disappointing.

But we don’t believe Brett’s absence was the reason we lost the game. As I’ve already said, we still had enough chances to win the game and it was our poor execution that let us down.

On top of that, there was nothing wrong with (stand-in full-back) Leroy Cudjoe’s performance on the night.

He’s done a lot of training at full-back during the winter and he knows the role well, so when Brett was finally forced to pull out we knew we had a ready-made replacement in Leroy who we knew wouldn’t let us down.

But we still left it fairly late in the day to take a final decision over Brett’s fitness.

He had trained well earlier in the week, and even though his back was fairly sore on Thursday we had hoped he would have passed his fitness test on the morning of the game.

The fact he failed that test was disappointing, but with the quality of personnel we had in the squad we hardly viewed it as the end of the world.

Then you lost Shaun Lunt with his wrist injury in the first half. That must have been a blow, too.