Hunter rugby: Merewether pack ready for Anzac Day test against Wanderers

The Greens claimed the shield last year with a 24-23 win in first grade capping a clean sweep of the men's grades.

The shield is named in honour of Merewether's Neil "Noodles" Adams and Wanderers' John "Fats" Halter. The Greens are also paying tribute this year to foundation players Jack Croft and Aub Jones, who served in World War II.

"It's a great day not only for the club and rugby, but it's a real celebration and respect for Anzac Day," Munro said.

Merewether opened their season last week with a 65-7 rout of Southern Beaches but face a tougher task on Tuesday against Wanderers, who downed Hamilton 41-35 in a try-for-try shootout.

"They've built a big pack of forwards and probably changed their style of play to what they've been playing the last couple of years with the change in personnel," Munro said of the Two Blues.

"So we've done our homework around that and we've got some strategies in place to try to nullify some of their big boys.

"We've always had the pace there, but we've made a few changes to the style the boys are playing. There's a lot of ball movement and we've done a lot of skill work in the off-season and a lot of work around the breakdown area too.

"It's building on what Jamie [Lind] created last year, which was a real toughness in defence, so hopefully we can piggyback onto that and move the bigger guys around."

The Greens still have Lachlan Milton, Bill Coffey and Dylan Evans unavailable, while prop Dave Puchert broke his foot last week.

Wanderers coach Trevor Hefren welcomed the winning start last week but he wanted a better performance.

"We didn't really play to our game plan as tightly as I would have liked and the outside backs defence wasn't fantastic from either side, but particularly from us," Hefren said. "We'd score but then we kept letting them back into it with poor defence. We didn't play in the forwards anywhere near as much as we should have.

"The way we've been playing for a long time now is to get it out to our backs as quickly as we can, because that's where our strength was. Our strength now is in our forwards."

He said No.8 Nimi Qio was "50-50" for the match after hyper-extending his elbow last week, second-rower Marcus Christensen was promoted to add size to the pack and Sam Ingham comes onto the wing.

On the weekend, Hamilton downed Maitland 22-19 and Uni defeated Southern Beaches 43-19.

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