The new England Elite Training Squad was announced this week with just two Giants players in it. Did you find that disappointing?

Yes, I did.

For a start, in my opinion, the two best back-row forwards in the competition at the moment are Brett Ferres and Liam Farrell (at Wigan).

And Jason Chan isn’t that far behind them – although he obviously plays for Papua New Guinea, so there’s not too much we can say about him!

But Brett has been playing very well, and I don’t think anyone would have been too surprised if he’d got the nod.

I also thought Shaun Lunt was a little unlucky, too, while there are others I could have mentioned as well.

But, at the end of the day, Macca (England coach Steve McNamara) can do what he wants because it’s his squad.

Also, when it comes to representative sides, players want to be picked at the end of the year rather than at the beginning. That’s when the international competitions are held, of course.

But you must also be pleased Eorl Crabtree and Leroy Cudjoe have retained their places?

And they’re both fully deserved. They’ve both been in good form.

Eorl’s always a consistent performer for us, while Leroy is getting better all the time.

When it comes to Super League centres, the two best at the moment are Leroy and Leeds’ Kallum Watkins, even though he’s been playing at full-back at the start of the year.

Danny Brough is another to miss out. But the big talking point with Danny is how much he was missed in Sunday’s home defeat to Bradford. Is that a big concern to you as well?

I’m sure everyone who watched that game would have questioned if Danny would have been able to make any difference at all!

Broughy is an important player for us, I’m not going to hide away from that.

But as good as he is, I don’t think he’d have helped us at the weekend.

There was just so much that went wrong collectively that having Broughy there wouldn’t have tipped the balance in our favour.

We’ve already put that game against Bradford to bed, and the key now is to look ahead rather than back.

So is it a case of tomorrow’s game at Leeds not coming soon enough?

When the players came in for training on Monday morning, you could tell they’d have loved to have played again on Monday evening.

They’re all desperate to right the wrongs as soon as possible, so in a sense it’s been a very easy week for the coaching staff.

That defeat to the Bulls – and the manner of it – has hit them all extremely hard.

So, I think it’s safe to say they can’t wait to go to Leeds tomorrow.

Everyone loves to win, but if you keep winning when you’re not playing well it can paper over the cracks.

So sometimes you have to get your backsides kicked to realise you still need to knuckle down and keep working hard, which is the case for us right now.

Hopefully, that’ll mean we can all give a much better account of ourselves at Headingley.

There was a sense of doom and gloom among the fans after Sunday. Was that the case with the players?

As I’ve already said, the nature of the defeat and the way we played hit the players hard.

No-one likes to play poorly. It’s one of the worst feelings in the world.

I’m the first to admit we didn’t play well and the scoreline also tells us we didn’t play well.

But the fact is that we’ve still won four from five and, with the way we’ve been travelling, we deserve to stick our chests out and hold our heads high, because we have made a fairly good start to the season.

Even though we lost to Bradford, we remain top of the table and intend to prove we deserve to be there tomorrow night.

It’s obviously not going to be easy, because Leeds at Leeds is one of the biggest challenges you can face in Super League.

They’re showing some good form and grinding out some good results.

It’s probably the test we need right now.