Defence buzzword as coach Hodgson gets to work at FC

Brett Hodgson believes improving Hull FC’S defence is the key to making progress over the club’s pre-season campaign. The Black and Whites’ new head coach has been with his squad for a week now and already he has made it clear Hull will have to up their game without the ball.

In truth, it was one of FC’S main downfalls last season.

While their offensive record was one of the best in Super League they also had the fourth worst defensive record in the competition.

Only Salford, Wakefield and Hull KR shipped more than points than Hull’s 436, an average of 25.6 points per game, and they all finished in the bottom three.

Hence, Hodgson has made ‘defence’ something of a buzzword at the club’s County Road training ground as he looks to raise standards.

“It will be for the next four or six weeks as well,” Hodgson told the Mail. “I’ve got full confidence in the players we’ve got in the team.

“We’ll do a little bit of work around our attacking structures and what we want to do offensively, but defence is the key to make sure we’re competing with the better teams in the competition and that’s what we have to really work hard on.

“What you see in Wigan and St Helens is that they do the same thing over and over again and they take the fatigue element out of it because they’re used to their habits being cemented into their system.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do to make sure we’re at that stage, it doesn’t come overnight, it comes after years of work and practice, believing in the system and striving to improve the system as well.

“We’re implementing some new structures into what we want to do defensively so hopefully we’ll buy into that as a group.”

Of course, a lot of the work done at the club’s training ground in the opening week of pre-season has been conditioning based, with head of high performance Paul Hatton putting players through their paces.

Hodgson has had chance to work with his squad on a daily basis, though, and while it’s still only early days, he’s been impressed with what he’s seen.

“The players are really buying into what we’re trying to establish here, they’ve trained hard and they’ve done it with smiles on their faces,” he added.

“I’m really happy with the initial progression of what we’ve done.

“There’s always some players that need to work hard in the pre-season and this year will be no different from any other year. We’re getting the work done in terms of their conditioning and some of the new processes that we’re trying to implement and that takes some time and over the next six to eight weeks we’ll make sure we’re putting all those stepping stones in place to perform.”