By DENISE BRADY
THE DEPTH of the squad at Catalans Dragons was tested to the limit against St Helens at the weekend and it came out on the winning side.
Captain Ben Garcia (pictured) and his fellow forward Joe Chan both fell ill before the game and had to be left out, which added to the problems their coach Steve McNamara had to face before the game.
McNamara had asked his players to respond to the previous week’s Golden Point defeat at Castleford, saying, “We’ve had a difficult week since Castleford after suffering several injuries. After last week it was so important that we made a response and we did that today.
“Tyrone May was injured at Castleford, we thought he might be okay for St Helens but he wasn’t quite ready. Tom Davies saw a specialist on Friday over his knee injury, he’ll be out for four to six weeks, Mike McMeeken has had an operation on his broken thumb so he could be out for a similar period.”
The only concerns from the win over St Helens for McNamara was a yellow card for Aussie prop Dylan Napa for a high tackle and a ruling by referee James Child and video official Ben Thaler who allowed a late try for Jack Welsby following a ball-steal on Sam Kasiano.
McNamara added, “I thought it was a very harsh sin-binning, it was a very hard tackle but I’m not sure it should have been a sin-bin. We had to step up and play even harder during that period when we were down to twelve men.
“And I have to say that I disagree that the try was allowed when Sam Kasiano had the ball stolen from him.
“As far as I’m aware, and I will have to check, the rules are that if one person has already been involved in the tackle, which he was and he got bumped off, the second person, regardless of whether it is one on one, cannot steal the ball.
“I’ll double-check and ask the officials downstairs if that’s the case but it was just another bit of adversity which we had to respond to during the game.”
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