Hughes looks for a major response

Kenny Hughes.

KENNY Hughes couldn't have picked a much tougher test than Bradford Bulls to make his 100th Oldham appearance.

Like Phil Joy, Michael Ward and Danny Langtree before him, the 26-year-old hooker from St Helens will reach his ton-up milestone in Roughyeds colours at Bower Fold on Sunday (3pm) after spending his entire senior career at the club.

All four spent their first two years at Whitebank in the reserves, reaching two grand finals under the stewardship of first John Hough and then Paul Ashton.

Add up the collective contributions of the fab four since Scott Naylor took charge in the autumn of 2012 and you've got to conclude that every penny invested in that long-gone second team was money well spent.

"They were good days," recalled Hughes. "But all that seems a long time ago. We've much bigger challenges on our plate now and although we had a bad day at Batley we'll be determined to respond against the Bulls.

"We can turn them over if we stick to our game plan and be a bit cleverer with the ball.

"We were close to beating Featherstone, London Broncos and Rochdale. We could have won all three on another day.

"We had two poor games at Hull KR and Batley, but it will come; it has to.

"From last week, we've just got to dust ourselves down and get on with it.

"We have a good team, a good set of lads and a lot of ability in the side, but we need to be more clinical and to tighten up defensively.

"Batley made a lot of mistakes in the early part of last week's game, but we didn't capitalise on them.

"We might be trying too hard to score on every play instead of building pressure and going for back-to-back sets. If we have the ball, they can't score.

"If we play like we did against London in our last home league game we'll have a good chance of turning Bradford over.

"We'll be giving it everything we've got, you can bank on that."

Bradford's latest insolvency crisis has been well documented, but with former NRL coach Geoff Toovey in charge they are up and running now and looking strong enough to survive in the Championship despite their minus-12 points deficit at the start.

They lost their first two games against Hull KR away (54-24) and Rochdale at home (22-14), but their only loss in the five games since then was a 42-12 reverse at London Broncos.

They have since rattled up nearly 100 points in beating Batley and Dewsbury at home, but they struggled to win at Swinton (35-28) and may be lulled into a false sense of security if they dwell too much on footage of how Oldham played at Batley.