'A team of actions': Ian Watson staying quiet on Huddersfield Giants' 2024 prospects

The 2022 Challenge Cup finalists appeared primed to kick on, only to drop from third to ninth in Super League.

As the season unravelled, Watson accused some of his younger players of believing the hype and even told certain individuals to "put your ego away".

With the benefit of last year's humbling experience, Huddersfield are keeping their feet firmly on the floor as they look to stay off everybody's radar.

"We've just got to focus on ourselves and not worry about the outside noise," said Watson.

"There hasn't been any noise yet, which is good in some ways. It goes along with the narrative that we've set that every day matters for us.

"We've just got to focus week to week. We're not going to get carried away with ourselves and set targets.

"Do we want to win things? Of course we do – but the best way for us is to be a team of actions rather than talking about it."

Huddersfield were not helped by injuries to important players in the opening months of last season, with Theo Fages and Josh Jones among the long-term casualties.

After waiting until February for their first friendly and sitting out round one, the Giants were beaten to the punch early on and failed to recover.

"The team we had last year was a good enough team but we just lost too many players, especially early in the season," said Watson.

"We lost eight players in the first eight games of the season – and they were players that you don't want to lose.

"Our pre-season has been better this year. We missed pre-season friendlies last year and couldn't play the team we wanted to against Castleford. Then we couldn't play against St Helens in round one. That affected us in quite a big way.

"The key thing for us is to refocus, understand what happened and learn from it."

Huddersfield face a different challenge this year after being given seven away games in the opening nine rounds, starting with a trip to Leigh Leopards on Friday night.

"That's a mentality and attitude test," added Watson.

"You're going to play them away at some point. It's unfortunate for us that we've got a load of away games at the start; you would have loved them all to be at home with your home support behind you.

"But you've got to look at it as a positive – we're going to have more home games later in the year."

The 2024 season has not yet begun but clubs are already planning for next year.

Huddersfield stole a march on their rivals by landing England prop Tom Burgess, a move Watson hopes will edge them closer to the cream of Super League.

"The aim was always to build a legacy to be able to compete with the best teams in the competition so we're not just having St Helens and Wigan at the top end of the table every year," he said.

"We want to break that monopoly. The way you do that is by getting the right core of young players that you can sign up long term and bring in the right kind of penthouse players that will nurture them.

"The more of those we can get, the better."

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