St Pat's want to improve their completion rates

ST Pat’s will be red hot favourites to take down the Orange Hawks in Bathurst tomorrow afternoon as they look to consolidate second place on the Group 10 premier league ladder.

While Hawks are yet to win a match, the Saints will be chasing their fourth victory of the season with the intent to bolster their possession and completion statistics.

Saints coach Kurt Hancock said the statistics back it up: when his team hold the ball their strike rate in attack is impressive, particularly across the opening 40 minutes.

“The next three weeks for us are very important. We’ve got the Hawks, Blayney then the bye. If we go into that bye with still just the one loss, then I’d say we’d come close to our pre-season aim for this time of the year,” he said.

“You get the sort of mistakes that we’ve been making when you try to play the expansive game that we do, but we’ve got to cut those errors down by at least half. We’re trying a different approach for the next few games and we set ourselves some goals at training – like completing 10 sets in the first half, even if it’s out of 20 or 21, it doesn’t matter.

“This year so far we’ve been a 55 per cent chance of scoring off our sets in the first half.

“We’re defending our line really well, but it’s late in each half where we’re getting the points scored on us. The most completed sets we’ve had in a half is nine, and that was against Lithgow. If we can get around that, then we’ll be cutting our work rate in defence in half. We were doing 160 to 180 tackles in that first half last week.”

Tomorrow, Pat’s can make amends against a winless Hawks side who have leaked 147 points in their three matches. 

“Hawks are getting better every week. There’s a lot of guys in there who are having their first year of first grade, and for many other just their second,” Hancock said.

“In the year we won the comp [2014] we led against them 20-0 and they ended up beating us 22-20. Last year they gave us a run for our money in a game where we should have beaten them. We’ve had a history of close games against the Hawks.”

Pat’s are still waiting for several key players to return from injury and suspension, but as a positive there are very few changes from the team who took to the field last weekend.

Derryn Clayton will move from the second row to take AJ Piper’s place on the wing, while Curtis Boardman has been promoted from the interchange bench into the starting side.

Hudson White’s injury from last round is still being assessed, but Nick Millar will be a welcome return for the Saints.

With no under 18s match this weekend, the premier league game will kick off at 

the Sportsground from the earlier time of 1pm.

ST PAT’S: 1 Tony Clevin, 2 Derryn Clayton, 3 Tyson Medlyn, 4 Rhys Frame, 5 Tim Collins, 6 Garry Reilly, 7 Joey Coughlan, 8 Brady Cheshire, 9 Benjamin John, 10 Travis Winanara, 11 Cyp Ale, 12 Curtis Boardman, 13 Andy Adams, 14 Nick Millar, 15 Chris De Young, 16 Jack Mackey.