The Robins will go to St Helens with a young squad on Friday night
Hull KR head coach Willie Peters has explained his squad decision to take on St Helens
Hull KR won’t be able to use fatigue as an excuse next week when they get their Super League play-off campaign underway.
That’s the message from Willie Peters who has chosen to rest up almost all of his first-teamers for Friday’s round 27 clash with St Helens at the Brewdog Stadium.
Mikey Lewis will play in order to get himself back up to speed after completing his two-match suspension and with the stand-off set to be the most experienced man in the squad, he’ll captain the side.
Sauaso Sue has been named but he isn’t expected to play, while it remains to be seen if Sam Luckley will be involved, too.
Peters took a similar approach to their trip to Wigan Warriors a fortnight ago, resting key men, and KR reaped the benefits as they turned in a energised showing against Huddersfield Giants last time out.
The head coach will be hoping to see something similar next week, when KR travel to their yet to be determined play-off opponents.
“This gives us the best opportunity to freshen things up and give us the best chance for the finals,” Peters said. “Finishing fifth or sixth doesn’t make a difference so that’s the thinking behind it, freshen things up and it gives the younger guys an opportunity.
“The Wigan game is a little bit different to this week, we’re resting the whole squad this week but you could see the benefit of guys having a week off because they’d played big minutes and the club had played 30-odd straight weeks.
“We like to think and I certainly believe that giving the players a rest this week will certainly give us a good opportunity to put in our best performance next week for sure.”
Confirming none of the players had been left out for injury reasons, he added: “Everyone has got niggles at this time of the year but the majority of the squad is getting rested.
“There are some injuries we need to manage, Tyrone is an example of that and there’s some in there like Jesse Sue, who has played a lot of games. He’s not injured, he had an ankle injury in there for a while but he’s come out of the other side.
“Mainly the players getting rested to freshen them up and we believe that will give us the best performance next week.
“I know this squad extremely well, you look at them every day and see them every day and the decision we made was to rest them.
“We thought that’s best but obviously there’s going to be a difference in opinion. I’m going off what I see every day and where we are at this stage of the year. We saw last week that some guys were freshened up and you could see that in the performance and we’re looking at that for next week as well. There’s no excuse for fatigue and being tired because they’re all getting their rests.”