Hughes set to make it a ton

If Kenny Hughes plays against Bradford Bulls on Sunday it will be his 100th Oldham RL appearance.

Like Phil Joy, Michael Ward and Danny Langtree before him, the 26-year-old hooker from St Helens is set to reach his ton-up milestone in Roughyeds colours after spending his entire senior career at the club, although he was in the Saints’ academy with Langtree before seeking pastures new.

All four spent their first two years at Whitebank in the reserves, reaching two grand finals under the stewardship of first John Hough and then Paul Ashton.

“They were good days, but all that seems a long time ago, said Hughes.

“We’ve much bigger challenges on our plate now and although we had a bad day at Batley we’ll be determined to respond positively against the Bulls.

“We can turn them over if we stick to our game plan and be a bit cleverer with the ball. For some reason, we don’t seem able to stick to what we set out to do.

“We were close to beating Featherstone, London Broncos and Rochdale. We could have won all three on another day. In the derby clash we just needed to be a bit smarter in the last few minutes.

“We’ve had two poor games, at Hull KR and Batley, but it will come right – it has to.

“From last week, we’ve just got to dust ourselves down and get on with it.

“We have a good team, a good set of lads and a lot of ability in the side, but we need to be more clinical and to tighten up defensively.

“Batley made a lot of mistakes in the early part of last week’s game, but we didn’t capitalise on them.

“We might be trying too hard to score on every play instead of building pressure and going for back-to-back sets. As long as we have the ball they can’t score.

“If we play like we did against London in our last home league game we’ll have a good chance of turning Bradford over.

“We’ll be giving it everything we’ve got, you can bank on that.”