Northey is Back!

Andy Northey

Northey made thirty two appearances for the club before moving to assistant coach to Mike Schmid. After Mike Schmid’s departure, Northey became head coach in January this year before moving to Sedgley Park at the end of last season to be their assistant coach.

Northey took time out this week to tell us how things are going for him and Sedgley Park.

Thanks for the chat Andy and good luck for the rest of the season – not on Saturday though mate.

“Things are going really well for me on a personal note; I’m working in St Helens driving and repping. I needed to get a foot on the ladder outside of the game and you can’t stay at the same place for a massive period of time, so it was time to move on and I’m happy with the way things are going at the minute.

On the rugby front we’re finding it quite tough and we’ve had some tough games – as they all are – but we’ve had a lot of away games. But once we come to the turn at Christmas we’ve got eight home games to five away games. So we reckon we can turn things around.

We’ve played well in patches but we’ve not put eighty minutes together yet, so we are confident that when we do, we can put a run together. But points wise it’s very tight at the bottom and we’re massively confident of staying up.

We played very well against Quins for twenty minutes at a very high intensity, but we’ve struggled to reach that level since, hopefully we can find it again against Rotherham at the weekend.

We are expecting a reaction from Rotherham after their defeat against London Welsh at the weekend. That was a kick in the teeth for us! It’s natural to put in a big performance after a defeat like that. Rotherham are going very well and we are going to have to contend with that.

Phil Jones is still looking for some sort of consistency really, he struggled with injuries at the start of the season and he’s not been able to string enough games together. But he’s starting to play well and he had a good game against Plymouth at the weekend. We’ve had individuals play well, it’s just as a unit we haven’t produced eighty minutes.

Top try scorer for the club is Jon Feeley on the wing and if he gets some space then he’s a dangerous attacker for us. We just haven’t been getting him enough ball.

We’re quite a balanced outfit overall, but we’re not over strong up front, but we feel we can match sides in the set piece. The back row is a little bit light and we do tend to try and throw the ball about a little bit. And if the weather right Saturday we’ll throw it around.

I’m massively looking forward to seeing a lot of friendly and familiar faces when I return at the weekend. I speak to Jim (Kilfoyle) regularly, I speak to some of the players regularly and it’s one of those places that I’m looking forward to coming back to.”