Leigh Leopards will be forced to shuffle their spine when they travel to Castleford Tigers on Thursday, with key half-back Gareth O’Brien sidelined.
O’Brien, who has been primarily used as half-back this season but can play full-back, failed a head injury assessment in Leigh‘s 46-4 win over St Helens last Friday, meaning the concussion protocol rules him out of this week’s clash with his former club Castleford and potentially their derby match against Wigan Warriors on Tuesday, August 6.
O’Brien‘s absence comes as a blow to the player and the Leopards, who have won their last three games with pretty much a full strength squad to choose from.
With the aforementioned injury in mind, Leigh coach Adrian Lam will have to shuffle his spine around but he has a couple of options. Here’s the primary ones at the Leigh coach’s disposal ahead of the trip across the Pennines to face the Tigers on Thursday.
The former Man of Steel winner was a notable absentee from the teamsheet that was named in their win over St Helens last week, with coach Lam opting to go with Umyla Hanley and Ricky Leutele as his centre pairing with Matt Moylan at fullback.
“It was obviously a selection headache during the last two or three weeks and he’s (Hardaker) played a lot of minutes and a lot of time this year,” Lam said of Hardaker’s absence in his post-match press conference. “We made that decision to rest him this week and he missed out but things may change every week on that, we’ll see how it goes.”
With O’Brien unavailable this week, you’d wager that Hardaker would return to the matchday 17, with Moylan moving into the halves alongside Lachlan Lam.
A backline of Darnell McIntosh, Hanley, Leutele and Josh Charnley would be kept in tact, you’d suspect.