Originally Posted by
Gray77
Do you really reckon 14 points a game needed improving on? If you inherit a side that ships an average of 14 a game you’re on to a winner IMO. Taking away a slice of what made us a good team to watch last season so you can improve the defence marginally isn’t IMO justified. He didn’t take over Hull KR, he took over a champion side that already had a good defence, and he’s merely made it a bit better at the cost of blunting our attack. Our failure to win big games over the last few years has not been our defence, and as I said on another thread his tactics on Friday didn’t actually win us that game either. It merely kept us in a game that developed into a slugfest after we were unable to get on top when we dominated early on.
A priority on attack would have seen us a try or two up in the first twenty on Friday and we’d have then had the upper hand as Wigan would have had to take chances. Instead we were one dimensional near their line and then had to resort to the slog for an hour, and save Hardaker missing two kicks it would have lost us the game. We earned the right to attack their line in the opening twenty, and we did nothing with the ball on numerous occasions. You have to give the coach credit for toughening us up slightly, but you have to give him stick for going into Friday thinking the only way we could beat Wigan was on a proverbial points decision after a 15 round fight. More ambition when we were on top early on and that 15 rounder doesn’t need to happen, we’d have knocked them out handily.
We’re all arguing as if that was our only way to beat the mighty Wigan when we dominated them early on and should have put them away. The reason we are so proud of our team for battling all night was because we had to, because we had nothing in our locker to score some tries when camped on their line early on. Some of us are focusing on the bits from 20-80 mins as if the first 20 mins didn’t happen. We could have blown that game wide open early on but we had no ambition or instructions on how to do it.
Our acceptance of all this is worrying really because once you start saying that it’s fine to kill yourself for an hour because you can’t score a try you’re admitting something very negative about the way the team is coached. We half killed ourself in a game we could have won in the first twenty, and we then half killed ourself in a game where nine times out of ten we’d have still lost barring two missed kicks and a miracle try by us.