Great start to rugby league season

HELLO everyone, welcome to the 4th edition of Churchie’s Comment for the year in your favourite rugby league newspaper — The National.
What a start to the footballing year for Papua New Guinea. Thanks to the PacificAus Sports programme, PNGAus Partnership programme, National Rugby League, Australian High Commission and the Cronulla Sharks and Canterbury Bulldogs for not only coming up here but embracing all of the country.
Speaking with the players and staff from both teams, they had positive feedback on the experience especially for the younger members of their team. Having come here to play as a 20-year-old myself, I know what a great experience it was for me.
Hopefully, this leads to more trial matches in future and if the stories in the media back in Australia are correct, then maybe even NRL competition games.
Most of the staff from the SP Hunters were exposed to the Sharks or Bulldogs staff over the weekend so that will help with our growth as a group.
Dean Pay and his staff were outstanding in this regard, especially with myself. Dean offered for me to be around his group at training and also invited me to be in the sheds and on the bench with them. Not just Dean in this instance, his staff were all too pleased to offer their time and knowledge. So I thank them for that experience.
I also had the pleasure of meeting Joe Grima over the activities around the NRL trial. Invited by the Papua New Guinea Rugby Football League and PNG LNG Kumuls coach Michael Marum for the Digicel Cup coaching conference, Joe is an energetic and infectious character. An outstanding coach in his own regard, he is engaging and personable and I hope the Digicel Cup coaches got as much as possible out of the sessions with Joe.
I also was afforded the opportunity to present at the conference, to give my ideas on how we can collectively improve the game here in PNG.
While not telling the coaches how they should coach but giving them the understanding of what we want our SP Hunters players to look like when they progress through the Digicel Cup. This was done as a list of habits, in attack and defence, things that fit seamlessly into any coaching system.
The weekend also provided us with the first opportunity to see how much of the SP Hunters pre-season we have taken on board.
We started with probably our most experienced team in the first half and if you looked at both halves of the game, that would have been evident in how we played.
We hit some of our target areas in the first half and while being far from where we want to be, I was pleasantly surprised by some aspects of our game. With the second half bringing a lot of our first-year players into the match, it was always going to get a bit loose.
Some of our systems in defence are the hardest for new players to adjust to. Most of the boys improved in the areas we have asked them to but I thought personally that Joe Joshua had a good game in a couple of positions. For first-year players, I thought Casey Dickson and Stanley Olo played really well and certainly didn’t look out of place.
We know we are hard to tackle, we know we possess great evasion and speed but it’s about how we maximise those and use them as weapons. The game has moved on from just individual talent to win games, it must be a collective effort.
So we are working hard to be better teammates and put ourselves into positions that help out our brother beside us. If you do this, you get players into one-on-one situations and I’ll back any of my players to beat anyone in this competition in that situation.
We travel to Cairns today for our second trial against the Northern Pride on Saturday.
With a big PNG Community down there, we will have a fan day tomorrow and I’m sure there are players with family and friends to catch up with while we are there.
Hopefully they turn out and support us strongly like many of you did last weekend.
Until next week, let’s respect and be kind to each other.

Cheers
Matt