WILDERSPOOL is a good place to be at present.

Everyone's optimistic about the season ahead and I am certainly looking forward to it.

The team now has to build on the good, positive start we had against St. Helens in the trial game two weeks ago.

We've set the standard now and we have got to make sure we maintain it through the year. I believe we can. In fact, we can improve upon it and I hope we can steer clear of injuries and keep our top players on the field for most of the year.

The pre-season work has been excellent and credit is due to Terry Gilogley and Paul Cullen for this area as they filled in for me while I was in Australia.

We're a much fitter and stronger side than we were this time last year. We changed our pre-season approach this time as I was conscious of the fact that we did not start too well last year. We made changes to meet the deficiency and it meant much more aerobic work to give the players a better aerobic base to build on.

As well as the preparation the attitude has been good too and I was confident in the Saints game that we would be able to handle anything they could throw at us. I was really pleased with our defence on that night. Saints scored three tries but one came from an interception and the other two from kicks. Our defensive line held firm for most of the game.

We have worked hard during the week on defending kicks because we face Featherstone on Sunday and Richard Chapman is an astute kicker who reads the game well.

I'm reasonably happy with the balance of our squad. I think we're still light in a couple of areas but every coach would say that.

I would have liked one more prop in the squad. We have four, but probably need five as they take the brunt of the work up front and they are the ones who will probably get injured more than anyone else.

But we will go into the season with what we've got within our salary cap restraints. There may be some change in the year because there is bound to be movement between clubs.

With the props we have I am going to try and rotate them as much as possible. Danny Nutley had a huge season for us last year but he played a lot of football. With there being 30 league games alone this year this is a lot of rugby so I am going to try and give players well-earned spells off the pitch.

Converted for the new archive on 13 March 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.