Women are going into unknown’ for Cup test

Warrington are third in the Championship, having won three of their four league games so far, but will go into the tie at Weetwood (noon) as underdogs.

Victory would leave Rhinos just 80 minutes away from a second successive cup final appearance, but coach Adam Cuthbertson is wary of what Warrington will throw at them.

“I think it would have been a good decision to have them in the Super League comp’ this year because they do field quite a strong team,” Cuthbertson said of tomorrow’s visitors.

“I think drawing them is good for the game in terms of the Warrington versus Leeds aspect, but it could be a tough one for us.

“We are going into the unknown, we don’t know a lot about them and the teams you draw in the early stages of the Challenge Cup can really come up and surprise you.”

Rhinos are third in Super League, with four wins from five matches and Cuthbertson reckons they are beginning to find their form.

“We had a bit of a slow start,” he admitted.

“We’ve been trying a lot of different things in the rotation of the team and we’ve almost had a mini pre-season because I don’t think we got enough out of the pre-season in general.

“The last couple of weeks we’ve had a really tough slog at training, I’ve put the girls through their paces and I think it has probably been a shock to their system in the sense of how we’ve gone about training.

“We will be a lot better for it in the long-run and you can really see the team starting to gel as a group.”

Cuthbertson has promoted several young players into his senior squad and he enthused: “The girls who’ve moved up from the under-19s have been really good.

“There’s been a ton of energy with the young girls and it creates competitiveness in the squad.”