Hi, it’s Eorl here.
And welcome to another new season - and one that will hopefully be even more successful than the last.
Obviously, that’s not going to be easy. It took a special effort to secure Huddersfield’s first top-of-the-table finish for 81 years and lift the Super League Leaders’ Shield.
But I can assure everyone we won’t be resting up until we back up that Shield success by lifting the Super League trophy at Old Trafford and the Challenge Cup at Wembley.
Some may say that sounds a little over-ambitious, but we do genuinely believe we now have the squad capable of winning everything the domestic game has to offer.
We feel we’re a stronger squad than last year, with the quality of our recruits already proving their worth.
Antonio Kaufisi has helped to take an incredible amount of the front-row pressure off Craig Kopczak and myself, while Chris Bailey is a very skilful and athletic back-row forward.
In a sense, you could say they have come in to replace prop Stuart Fielden and back-row forward Luke O’Donnell from last season’s squad - and how many games did they end up playing in 2013?
So that in itself immediately adds to our strength. And then we’ve also got Jodie Broughton on board.
Jodie’s a top-class winger and incredibly fast, but is still waiting to make his debut.
How quickly that comes around is down to our other wingers.
Jermaine McGillvary and Aaron Murphy got the nod ahead of him for our opening-night win at Wigan, and I don’t think it was any great surprise hese two played well on the day. They know any dip in form means Jodie will step straight in.
In other words, having Jodie around means our wingers must step up another gear to keep hold of their spots. How healthy is that!
I think Anthony Mullally’s loan spell at Bradford Bulls could be the making of him.
Big Mull has been outstanding throughout pre-season training and can count himself unlucky that he has not featured in our opening games.
So I wouldn’t be surprised if he did ‘a Dale Ferguson’ as a result.
If you remember 12 months ago, Fergy struggled to get into the side, went on a month’s loan to Hull KR, came back to us and then killed it for the rest of the season.
He benefited from the chance to play in Super League regularly while he was at the Robins and made the most of it – as could Mull.
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