Melbourne coach Craig Bellamy says the Storm “got what they deserved” in their last loss to the Warriors but feels they’re better prepared to take on their bogey side in Wednesday’s Anzac Day NRL encounter at AAMI Park.
Not that the Storm believe the Warriors are a bogey side, although three losses in their last four meetings – the most recent in their preliminary final last season – suggests otherwise.
Bellamy said the Warriors simply outplayed them.
“Last year they beat us here twice. They played better than us on both occasions and they got what they deserved and we got what we deserved,” he said.
“They played their usual brand of footy and really hung on to the footy and when a team plays like that, especially the Warriors, they’re really hard to handle.”
While there’s no grand final berth on the line, the Storm, who expect all their representative players to line up, have the opportunity to set a new club record with eight successive wins to start the season.
Bellamy also said his team was honoured to have the opportunity to play on Anzac Day in front of what is expected to be their biggest crowd of the year.
The Storm felt they were out-muscled by the Warriors’ fearsome pack, which managed to make plenty of ground up the middle as well as their ability to offload.
Bellamy said the return of former Storm forward Ryan Hoffman as well as the addition of veteran Jason Ryles would help them in that department.
“We’re a little bit bigger than last year and that was a little bit of issue.
“It’s great to have Hoffy back and Jason’s doing a really good job for us.”
They felt they got a good test of their measure to handle the Warriors game plan in their hard-fought last round win over Canterbury, when they ran out winners.
“We think we know how they’re going to go about their game and I’m sure they think they know how we’re going to go about our game,” Bellamy said.
“They’re a very dangerous team when they hang onto the footy and things start clicking for them and their offloads start sticking.
“They’re a wonderful bunch of ball-runners and guys like (Shaun Johnson) and (Kevin) Locke are hard to handle.”
