Green hurt, but stays positive
Injured Warriors five-eighth Blake Green believes it could be beneficial for the club for him to be hurt right now.
The biggest scare for the Warriors this season is if Green picks up a significant injury, now that Shaun Johnson is no longer at the club.
Green is helping to get rookies Chanel Harris-Tevita and Adam Keighran up to speed for the start of the new season, but the club will get an early taste of what life is like without Green after he suffered a hamstring injury.
Thankfully for the Warriors, the injury isn’t that serious, but it will hamper his build-up for the new season.
Green was on the field during the Warriors’ training session yesterday, giving advice.
But for the next few weeks it will be Harris-Tevita and Keighran running the moves in the halves.
Green believes his injury will help them grow as players.
‘‘It’s a good opportunity because they’ll get two full weeks of training without me being on the field,’’ Green said. ‘‘They’re going really well, they’ll learn on the run and it’s probably going to help their understanding of the game even further I reckon.’’
As for his injury, the 32-yearold Green said it occurred while in the middle of a training session this week.
‘‘I picked up a hamstring strain on Tuesday at training,’’ he said. ‘‘We were just doing a skills session.
‘‘It’s nothing major to worry about, a couple of weeks and I’ll be back out there.’’
The Warriors’ first trial game is against the Melbourne Storm in Geelong on February 22, while their other one is against Wests Tigers in Whangarei a week later.
While Green’s injury isn’t serious, he’s unlikely to play in the first of those games, and is questionable for the second.
‘‘I haven’t really looked that far ahead,’’ he said.
‘‘To be honest, I probably wasn’t going to be playing in the first trial anyway and it’s up to Mooks [Warriors coach, Stephen Kearney] to see if I was going to play in the last one.
‘‘But I’m pretty confident that I’ll be ready to go for that one, it’s not until four weeks’ time.’’
Warriors assistant coach Stacey Jones said the club wasn’t overly worried about Green’s injury.
‘‘When players of his age go through a lot of preseason drag it’s tough on their bodies.
‘‘When a player like that pulls up feeling a bit tight in certain areas, you’ve got to give them a rest.’’
Like Green, Jones said he could see the positive side to the situation, with Harris-Tevita and Keighran both getting more of a run at training.
‘‘Obviously, when you have a key player that’s not involved in training, you’ve got to throw someone in there and that gives an opportunity for one of the other young halves to step up, but Greeny will be all right.
‘‘You’ve got to prepare for everything,’’ Jones added.
‘‘Last year when we had key players out, we had other players come in and do a job. The same thing will probably happen again this season, we’ll have crucial players that can’t take the field and we’ve got other players who are ready to go.’’
Meanwhile, Jones responded to comments from former Warriors prop James Gavet, who this week told NRL.com that his move to the Newcastle Knights was forced by his old club threatening to drop him to reserve grade this season.
‘‘In the end they weren’t too keen on me staying and if I stayed they said I’d have to cop a few things,’’ Gavet told NRL.com.
‘‘They said I’d have to play in State Cup and that even after starting all year.
‘‘They don’t get rid of you, but they force your hand, and in the end they tell the media that ‘he left and he was a bad trainer’ and what not.’’
But Jones says, as far as he knew, that wasn’t the case. ‘‘It’s news to me,’’ he said.
‘‘I haven’t heard anything along those lines and as far as I know, James was given an opportunity to go to Newcastle and good on him.
‘‘He did a good job for us while he was here. For a player of his ability, I don’t think he’d be playing in the reserve-grade side.
‘‘I can’t comment on that, because I don’t know.’’