AFTER the enforced break last week for the weather, it's fair to say we will be presented with difficult opposition this week when we visit Keighley Cougars.

I list Keighley in the same bracket of games as York, Workington, Whitehaven, Hunslet and Doncaster, who will all prove difficult opponents on their own ground.

I am well aware they defeated Bradford Bulls last year in a pre-season game at Cougar Park and we all saw the difficulties they posed for us in the game at Odsal in our final trial match this year.

That was a very intense and fiery affair and we had to play well to come away with the spoils that day. We are certainly going to be challenged to the full, but you should be challenged in sport and we are ready to accept that challenge.

The weather has caused some disruption to out training schedules as well as meaning we couldn't get the game against the Skolars played. Preparation has not been the best. We missed a session and we have had to compensate by training indoors and on the 4G pitches but that is an organisational challenge.

However, I still feel that our players are fully conversant with our systems, structures and organisation, so I am quite at ease with it and I am pretty sure they will be fully prepared and ready for the game on Sunday.

As I said we missed the game against the Skolars because of the weather, despite the efforts of the groundstaff and, although we can take a postponement in the case of the Skolars, it is not something we want to be encountering on a regular basis as we don't want a fixture backlog.

Hopefully we find a suitable midweek date to play them if we progress in the Challenge Cup or find a cup weekend if we are knocked out. That's for the organisation to sort out but I was disappointed to miss it because I feel we are in a good place and when you are in a good place you want to play week in and week out.

Following the victory over West Wales Raiders in the Ladbrokes Challenge Cup, we have drawn Hunslet in the next round and it happens to fall immediately prior to our League fixture against them. That's never ideal but we will just have to the old Kenny Dalglish maxim and take it one game at a time.

First we focus on Keighley and then we will look at Hunslet in the Challenge Cup before we tackle them in the league.

They are all different and provide different challenges and we will embrace that.

Before the weather intervened our under-16s had a tremendous win at Widnes, never an easy place to go and I am really comfortable with what the junior department are doing here.

The Scholarship is really good and the under-16s are developing players really well and they are coming together as a group and the under-19s, although they lost at Leeds in the season opener, showed enough signs to show me they will be really competitive going forward and there are enough quality players in there should we need to call on them in the first grade.