I agree with you. It was great to see them both performing well and they both made a difference.
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1. Your covering something which may never and hopefully would never happen. If all goes well then your playing with 16 men. Something we simply cannot afford to do. Something which is ridiculous when you have players who would be more than capable of A) making a contribution for the first 70 B) shifting around if neccesary.
2. "game time" isn't something we should be giving players when down by 7 points in an extremely tight game against rivals.
3. His performance suggested he wasn't, and if he was then he should have been brought off earlier.
4. CAN BE being the optimal phrase. He hasn't done anything this season.
I'm not having a dig at Kyle. It has nothing to do with him. I think it is an absolutely terrible ploy whether Kyle is the bench guy or not.
Though gaskell was very poor again tonight. Twelve minutes isn't enough for Kyle to make any sort of impact, and didn't do anything wrong. Not impressed by Simmons' tactic with regards to subs, we played 60 minutes with 15 men. That said, throw Pryce in, and cloughy on the bench it's a different team..
Not watched it again, a few initial thoughts. Wellens defensively was excellent, however he's potentially cost us two tries tonight, being too slow to pick up the charge down (although you can level that at gaskell really) and where he cost us a drop out which they scored from.
Thought we made crucial errors at important points, lomax's knock on following the 40/20, and graham's from a penalty are two which immediately spring to mind.
Once again I think reverted back to one out rugby when we looked good playing rugby.
Wire certainly are beatable though
It seems like we are trying to put 3 men into a tackle now, similar to Wigan. For a big period it slowed them down well and we were frustrating them!
To be fair, if the coach felt the game needed Kyle, then he left too late. Maybe a better option could have been to put Gaskell at centre, and move Sia to the forwards. We would have had a little pace on the field, and still a pretty fresh forward moving inside. The really disappointing thing is, they were there to be beaten, we gave away a very soft 1st try, conceded what looked like a blatant knock on try, King's was a good try, but we should have attacked him more after his injury. We then made a great fightback, but needed to score first in the 2nd half, but went onto lose the ball on the first tackle on at least 3 occasions, then they score at 2 maybe 3 tries on the back of penalties. One more thing, for those who have seen the match on TV, was Meli not impeded for the Hodgson try? because someone definately made contact with him.
But as I saw it at the game, on the screen, the penalty should have been awarded before the tackles were to be made. The way I saw it was, that it was no different to what happened at Bradford, a player made contact with a defender, thus making his attempted tackle more difficult.
I agree but Smith was Video Ref at Bradford as well
I thought Perry played well.
Soliola had a good game too.
What did annoy me last night was how Stevo and a couple of others were seemingly 'knocking' the performances of LMS this season. Ok, he probably hasn't made as much impact as the lad himself would have wanted, but he hasn't played badly, far from it. He runs aggressively, and takes the ball up for us, and does his work in defence.
As much as it will annoy the people who cannot have a bad word said against him, if there was one of our forwards that needed to give us some go forward, it is James Graham, who at the moment, seems to be 'talking a good game' when on the pitch and shouting abuse at officials, etc... when really, he needs to direct his aggression at giving us some go forward.
I agree.
You can forgive/allow Jammer petulance and shouting at officials when he is making good yards but he is just getting dominated at the minute and the opposition know he will never have ago at them he'd much rather stomp around at the ref.
We really lack someone who is willing to get stuck in and if needed throw a few punches. We are too willing to take any big hits/dirty tactics/dominant tackles.
1 time. Before that the last punch thrown by a Saints player was probably Scully.
More than just punching though we seem all too willing to accept any nigling dirty play or cheap shots and would rather stomp around at the ref (Wellens and Jammer) rather than giving abit back and getting stuck in, especially our props.
Teams must know that if they get slightly dirty (and the refs ignore it) then we won't respond.
My thoughts on last night.
Our best performance of the entire season for 35 mins (25 in the first and 10 in the second).
Decidedly average for the remainder.
We have completely lost the ability to control the tempo of the game. Last night Wire did to us what we have done to sides for 10+ years. They upped the tempo when they needed to do so and effectively did just enough to win the contest. I actually could not believe we were so poor for the first 25 of the second half. When you have worked like we did to get back in the game, it was unforgivable to give it away again by reducing our intensity. We upped the intensity of our game for 35 minutes and Wire literally did not have an answer to us, they couldn't get out of their own half for periods last night. Moore was absolutely immense and has completely changed my opinion of him around, really wanted it in a massive game last night. Perry showed why we missed him against Wigan. We actually improved and began to dominate in the periods where Perry and Moore were on the field together.
Anyway