I’m the man to help steer Souths: Keary

Rookie South Sydney five-eighth Luke Keary is adamant his halves pairing with Adam Reynolds can be a successful one for the Rabbitohs.

In the duo’s first outing this year in the Souths’ halves, the club crashed to an upset loss to Gold Coast two rounds ago in probably their worst performance of the year.

With regular five-eighth John Sutton moving to the back-row to accommodate Keary’s return from a pectoral muscle injury he suffered in the pre-season Auckland Nines, the Rabbitohs largely failed in click into gear in attack.

Rugby league immortal Andrew Johns suggested on Triple M’s broadcast of the match that the Reynolds-Keary halves combination would not bring long-awaited premiership success to Redfern.

But Keary, 22, was confident his relationship with Reynolds would flourish given they shared a pre-season together before he was injured.

“We did a bit of work in pre-season and it felt really good there in the trials. We haven’t had much time together since,” he said.

“Against the Titans we just dropped far too much ball and didn’t want to defend our errors.

“But for that combination we will just work hard on it and see where it takes us.

“We only had a week together (before the Titans fixture), but we have had the bye and that will help us.

“Obviously when you spend the whole pre season with someone you are going to understand each other so we felt pretty comfortable together at the start of the year.”

Keary says he has fully recovered from the injury after 16 weeks sidelined and a couple of weeks with Souths’ feeder club North Sydney.

“It was good to be out there, I was happy to get through 80 (minutes), the loss was disappointing, but the body pulled up good which is pleasing.

“I thought I did some good things out there and there is some stuff we can build on.

“I came back from an ACL a couple of years ago so … It takes a couple of weeks to get your match fitness back but mentally I am sweet now.

“It was disappointing but I tried to look at the positives and I got basically two pre-seasons in there so the body is feeling good, I am feeling pretty fresh and fit.”

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