Bradford head coach Francis Cummins has revealed that he is hopeful of adding to his squad in time for the Bulls’ clash with Huddersfield on Sunday.
Cummins will be without two of his loan signings at the weekend – Greg Burke will be out for two months after dislocating a shoulder on debut for the club against Hull FC, and Anthony Mullally is ineligible against his parent club. That has left the Bulls short in the pack, but the Bulls boss admits he has some “little leads” regarding new signings.
“There’s always a prospect of getting someone in – but things don’t tend to happen quickly,” Cummins claimed.
“If I had things my way then people would have been here yesterday. However, we have to go through the RFL, who then has to go through the administrator so it turns out we’ve only got little leads.
“Until it happens though, there’s no point in my being too excited though.”
The Bulls are coming into the West Yorkshire derby off the back of a heavy defeat against Hull FC, as they slumped to a 44-16 loss at the KC Stadium. Cummins admits that the Bulls were architects of their own downfall that evening, and claims his side have to be “smarter” if they are to avoid the drop.
“We don’t have the biggest middles at the moment, so we almost overplayed it a little bit. We simply made too many yardage errors, and we are going to have to be a little bit smarter.
“When we got in good areas and stuck to what we did we looked really good. However, we just need to not panic – we’ve enough quality to score against any team, but we just need to stick in the arm-wrestle for a little bit longer and be a bit smarter.”
The Bradford boss admits it will be a huge challenge against last year’s league leaders – but claimed they are not at the peak of their game yet, and is hopeful their patchy start to the season will continue this weekend.
“They’re a good team; they’d probably like to be a little bit higher on the ladder than where they are, but they look to be just a little bit out of form. Hopefully that will continue for another week.
“They’ve got some great variations on what they can do and where they can go. They like to go down the middle but they have got some great backs to supplement that. It will be a tough test, that is for certain.”
