Craig Fitzgibbon has confirmed that his Cronulla Sharks will receive a massive boost for their game against the Sydney Roosters, with Connor Tracey set to play.
The fullback left the stadium last weekend in a knee brace after being forced from the field against the Canberra Raiders with ten minutes left to go in the contest.
“Connor is looking like he's good to go,'' Fitzgibbon said on Friday, providing an update on the number one via AAP.
“The benefit of having a 22-man squad is if in the event that Connor wasn't right, we'd put Will in there.
“Will basically hasn't trained much at all in six weeks. If something was to happen to Connor and we couldn't get him up, we might have had to roll the dice and taken a risk on Will.
“To say that his preparation was ready for that was going to take a huge effort from Will, and it would have been a big risk.
“We thought we'd offer that just in case Connor didn't get up, but Connor is looking good.”
Tracey made his way into the number one jersey after first-choice fullback Will Kennedy was sidelined with a hamstring injury, and Kade Dykes, the Sharks' second-choice fullback, has been unavailable all season due to rupturing his ACL.
In his press conference, Fitzgibbon also spoke about if the club was ever thinking about moving the game to Allianz Stadium to fit more fans in the stadium.
“It's not our view. It's a policy,” he added.
“How a policy works is it's applied by someone other than us, so it's not a question for the Sharks.
“We earned the right to host a semi. If we weren't playing for a home semi last week, then I would have rested a host of players, and then we'd get criticised for resting a host of players to get ready for a semi-final.
“The policy is the policy. If they change the policy, then we're fine with the policy because we don't have a stake in the game. That's not up to me.”
