Adam O’Brien has been released from hospital after suffering a serious neck injury.
The Huddersfield hooker was stretchered from the field in the Giants’ defeat to Leeds and spent the weekend in St Helens and Whiston hospital.
But he was discharged on Sunday and the 27-year-old received a huge boost after being told he would not require surgery to fix the injury.
That said, O’Brien is expected to be out for a significant period of time and may not feature again this season after damaging his C4 vertebrae, which will inevitably require some significant recovery time.
O’Brien has been an ever present this season and his absence will see youngster Reiss Butterworth probably called up into the squad.
Recent injury problems have resulted in the club adding Academy international Robson Stevens and Ireland internationals Ronan Michael to their bubble, which will allow them to train and be in contention for selection.
Giants Managing Director Richard Thewlis said: “There are obvious challenges for every club ahead and for us it made sense to now bring Robson off the furlough scheme and agree a triallist type contract with Ronan ahead of his re-joining anyway on December 1st.
“His time at Canberra was unfortunately cut short by the pandemic and has been pushing to return to us as soon as we were able to finance the realities of it. Gone are the days of simply ringing a lad up to come train – we have complex issues around the whole Covid-19 procedural bubble of first team training and interaction, minimum wage regulations, financial payment and it’s all far from straight forward.
“That said we believe both these lads have long term futures at our club and this period will help them develop as players and people with the possibility of course they may even debut during the course of this season as time moves on.
“A further added benefit is that it gives Simon (Woolford) more bodies at training to work with because at times we have been very low on numbers as players spent time away with injury rehabilitation. If called upon these lads would be squad numbers 35 and 36, which illustrates perfectly the situation.”
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