Horgan welcomes fitness boost for struggling Neath

NEATH coach Patrick Horgan has revealed that fitness has been his squad’s “biggest weakness” this season with the club lingering near the foot of the Principality Premiership.

The enforced lay-off due to the start of the autumn internationals, however, has given Horgan the chance to work on the players’ conditioning as they prepare for Saturday’s clash against Newport.

“The week off has really helped us,” said Horgan. “We’ve done a lot of conditioning. Our fitness levels have been our biggest weakness this season so we’ve been concentrating on strength and conditioning and will do so for the next few weeks to get our fitness levels to where they should be.

“Unfortunately we won’t see many, if any, returnees from injury this week. Gravs (Gareth Gravell) is still injured as is Gareth King. The only changes from the Cardiff game a fortnight ago will be the two new signings we’ve picked up – prop Marc Jones and centre John Leyshon.

“We’ve just been concentrating on getting the fitness levels of our fully fit players up. Hopefully we’ll have some players back in the next three or four weeks and we’ll be stronger again. The way things are working out, we’ll probably pick up another couple of injuries but that’s where we need strength in our squad.”

Neath are on a five-match losing streak in the league, going down 25-12 to Cardiff in their last outing, leaving them just two places and four points off the foot of the table.

On Saturday they face a side enjoying an upturn in form with wins over Swansea and reigning champions Pontypridd in their two most recent league matches.

“Newport are a decent side,” added Horgan. “It’ll be difficult. Last year Newport went through what we’re going through now. Having good players but not performing very well. They’ve had some good wins but every game is tough for us right now.

“Confidence is a bit low and everyone still wants to beat us as we’re Neath and we’ve been up there since the inception of professionalism.

“We’ve improved recently, we just need to keep it up. We had a good win over Bedwas (in the British & Irish Cup) and scored a lot of points, we should have beaten Bridgend but our set pieces were poor and we could have won at Cardiff too.

“We didn’t take our chances and that’s also where we need to improve. If we can take our opportunities against Newport, a bit of confidence will return which is what we need.”