Watson’s happy for Devils to take break
IAN Watson has admitted his Salford side exceeded their own expectations with a top-four finish in the Super League regular season – and believes it is a combination of mental and physical fatigue that has brought about their current slump in form.
The Red Devils have just one win in their last 10 league matches, but are now looking forward to their first weekend off of the year, hoping it will represent an opportunity to refresh both mentally and physically.
“We trained really hard in preseason because we didn’t want to be anywhere near a Million Pound Game – that was a big focus for us,” revealed Watson.
“And that’s probably something for me as a young coach really to learn from. We absolutely put our boys under the pump and on the back of that, we’ve not had a week off at all, whereas other teams have had weeks off to freshen up.
“To be honest, some of our guys are probably mentally beat at the moment with that.
“What we need to do now in this week off – it’s going to be good for us – we need to find a balance now between training and freshening people up mentally and physically.
“Hopefully this couple of weeks will give us a bit of time as well to get a couple of players back on the playing field, which can give us that little bit more experience at this time of year.”
There has been mixed news on the injury front, with Lee Mossop and Connor Williams the latest to be ruled out for the remainder of the season.
However, Watson is hopeful Rob Lui, Kris Welham, Junior Sa’u and Ben Murdoch-Masila will be fit for the visit of Wakefield to the AJ Bell Stadium a week on Friday.
The Red Devils have three home matches out of four as they look to book a play-off place, which would further reward for a season that has surprised so many observers, following last year’s miraculous Million Pound Game escape.
“We worked really hard to make sure we got to where we wanted to get. We wanted to make sure we got in the top eight, top six if we could.
“We did a little bit better than what we expected with the top four, but now is somewhere where you want to kick on, but we need to be right and learn our lessons through what we’ve done mentally and physically.”