Blues head coach Pat Lam admitted Saturday’s pre-season game against the Hurricanes did little to clear his selection headaches, with a number of players producing impressive first-up performances.
Lam was pleased with the opening hit-out as the Blues ran in six tries to one in their 36-22 rout of the Hurricanes, but he knows there is still plenty of work to do ahead of their first match against the Crusaders on February 24.
“Some of these guys haven’t played rugby since August and they’ve done a lot of work on conditioning. I was after systems and structures and there was a lot of stuff that was very positive out there,” he said.
“Things for us to work on are just the little details. We gave away a lot of penalties and that was good, I actually wanted referee Bryce Lawrence and the assistant referees to be pretty hard on us so we could go back and do a good review.
“There were times where we were often offside and you can't carry someone on defence so there’s a good work-on there and also just sealing off which the referees are going to be hard on this year and a couple of guys were guilty of that too.
“But all in all I’m happy we got the game under our belts and I was really pleased with some of the structures we put in place; our defence was good too.”
Playing without most of All Blacks on Saturday who are expected to get a run against the Melbourne Rebels this week, a number of new faces certainly put their hands up for selection.
George Moala was a standout in the first half with some solid tackles and a brilliant try as he powered his way through three defenders, while wingers David Raikuna and Sherwin Stowers were also impressive.
“I’ve just got to keep reminding myself George is only 20-years-old,” Lam said.
“He’s built like a brick house and he had no options in the try he scored other than to run over them and he did that, carrying two or three defenders over the line.
“The same goes with David Raikuna and Sherwin Stowers, there are some real selection headaches and it’s only early days but these guys are bringing their pre-season training, attitude and form into the game. That’s great, I want the selection decisions with myself and Bryce Woodward to be hard. It shows we have a lot of depth within the squad.”
Another real positive for Lam was the performance of his Wider Training Group players. Hooker James Parsons had a strong game, while Hadleigh Parkes set up Dan Pryor for a try and Wayne Ngaluafe showed some nice touches at halfback.
“They were superb, all of them - Wayne Ngaluafe, Ben Lam, Hadleigh Parkes, James Parsons, Sean Polwart, Dan Pryor and Steven Luatua all performed,” Lam said.
“The really neat thing is like I mentioned earlier in the week, they’ve been the best Wider Training Group because of the process we had where they had to interview for their jobs and apply and they were successful.
"Because of that process they’ve verbalised what they wanted and how much they wanted it and they’ve been superb this whole pre-season. To give them an opportunity and for them to get out and play well was superb and it shows that we’re in a healthy state if we get any injuries during the season because we’re confident they can step in.”
There were no major injury concerns to come out of Saturday’s game. Daniel Braid struggled with his Achilles in the warm-up and did not play, while Alby Mathewson and Brad Mika suffered minor niggles, but all should be fit and healthy to play the Rebels on Saturday night.
The team reassembles on Monday for a pre-season camp in Whangaparoa before flying across the Tasman on Friday morning.