Corcoran praises Eagles' "hunger to succeed"

21/04/2021

Sheffield Eagles Assistant Coach Ged Corcoran has been thrilled to see the squad’s “hunger to succeed” both on the pitch and in training. 

The Eagles have bounced back from a Challenge Cup defeat to York City Knights by beating the North Yorkshire club as well as Bradford Bulls in the first two fixtures of the league campaign. 

The loss in the Challenge Cup also meant elimination from the 1895 Cup but Corcoran was still happy with the performance, which has helped Sheffield to hit the ground running in the Championship. 

“It’s no disrespect to the cup competitions, as we are holders of the 1895 Cup, but the York game was always going to be a gauge for us,” Corcoran said. 

“We had a great pre-season, the boys have flown through the programme set up by Simon Vardy. 

“We came away with a lot of positives from that first game against York but there were a lot of areas we needed to fix up and tweak. 

“That’s what we did during that week away leading up to the Bradford game, and the rest is history.”

The Eagles forwards have left their mark on the league victories so far this year, in both attack and defence. 

As an ex-forward himself, there’s nothing more pleasing for Corcoran than seeing the big lads roll their sleeves up and get stuck in. 

“It’s great to see the forwards dominating but it’s also exciting too,” he added.

“We have a good balance of senior players and youngsters. 

“We’ve got the likes of Matt James, Scott Wheeldon, Frankie Mariano, James Davey and even Greg Burns is becoming one of the more senior players now too. 

“We have some enthusiastic, energetic young players in Jordan Bull, Blake Broadbent, and Paddy Burns. Mark has made a really good signing in Tyler Dickinson, too. 

“There’s a hunger to succeed and they do everything we ask of them and sometimes that is a lot. 

“It’s shown how strong and fit we are but not only that, we’ve got a smart group of players on the edges and the middles are capable of punching holes in the opposition defence.” 

Corcoran has his sights set on Newcastle this Sunday and the newly promoted team have some big bodies the Eagles will need to contend with. 

He has warned there’s no room for complacency after a couple of eye-catching results. 

“We’re not going to approach Newcastle any differently to what we did against Bradford and York,” Corcoran said. 

“We’ve set our standards, we need to abide by that and keep achieving week-in week-out. 

“Thunder are coming into the game after losing to Whitehaven but they certainly have a number of threats. 

“The Chapelhow brothers off the bench are big boys and we’ll have to get into the arm wrestle with those guys.” 

By Dan Fowler, photo by Alex Coleman