We had to resort to a below average back row running around at stand off thinking he was the second coming of Thurston in the 1st half. Salford were gassed and your kicking on the 2nd and 3rd tackle.
Another half went by when Saint's did not manage to score a point, it's uncanny how many times that has happened under this coaches tenure.
The club are positioned where Gray77 predicted. Doing enough to get by without demonstrating potential to get past top teams when it matters and doing enough to ensure no likelihood of change in the short to medium term.
Quite simply because with Fages in the team we would have had more confidence and composure, and we weren't beaten by much regardless of what all the doom-mangers are saying on here.
This wasn't a game where we were hammered like the Leigh game, it was more like the hull game where we COULD have won it.
By all means keep on knocking every aspect of the team, keep on kicking out and at the end of the day we are all entitled to an opinion!
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It was a reasonably entertaining game, and we lost a game that could have gone either way. Maybe we'd have won had Fages not been injured, or maybe not. Maybe we'd have lost more heavily had Carney started for them, again, maybe not. It was interesting that Wilkin slotted straight into first receiver instead of Lee doing that, so we were handicapped again by slow progression of the ball. I was watching with an old mate from Bradford, and he spotted straight away that there were several sets of six were Smith only touched the ball once or twice, and one of those moments was to kick on the last. Wilkin had too much of the ball again, and I'm struggling to see what KC was thinking Smith would do as a dominant organising 7 because he was peripheral for long periods.
It is quite obvious that when we play it left we are a massive threat, but I still don't think we are coached well enough in the aspects of ball handling, drawing in defenders and using overlaps. We bombed a couple of tries down there because we were too eager to just get it to Percival immediately. We all want a nice looking team that gets the ball wide, but you have to know how to do it so that it punishes teams. We seem like we've been told 'get it out to MP' and we just hoy it out in his direction without doing the fundamentals along the way. It is too easy for defenders to position themselves in front of us when we do this. This is coaching I suspect, and it is something we can do alot better, and should be really good at because we have the players to run riot down that left side.
But, we just lost a game. You can look at it in isolation and say it was one defeat, or you can look at it as another game we lost to a team that is in form. You can look at this as a mere hiccup after the encouraging wins over the last 2 weeks, or you can say that those 2 wins were against struggling teams low on confidence and this was a return to us blowing games against teams who went for us and were ambitious. I suppose we'll all have our own opinions.
We are a team whose skills and tactics at the moment should be enough to beat the likes of Salford, Leigh and Wakefield (no disrespect to any of them.) We lost all three games through ill-discipline and silly errors. We are not a free-scoring team with the Millward-era "bugger the defence, we'll just score more than you" attitude.
We have lost 3 of our games this year through errors, penalties and poor defence, allowing offloads galore in last night's game. These problems should be relatively easy fixes compared to sorting out our attack and last play options, and things we should be working on if we are to have any chance of success this year.
We are a big threat attacking down the left.once teams suss out how to defend that threat then what else do we have to offer.the right gets no ball at all and the longer that goes on then morgans confidence will suffer even more.its the first time fir years we jave 2 genuine centres and we continue to only use one.predictable or what .
Wilkin kicking on the 2nd tackle 20 out from their line didn't help at all, couldn't fathom that one for the life of me. Smith's much feted kicking game raely showed itself last night, and when it does the best thing about it being our chase says a lot about how poor we still are. When will someone grab him by the scruff and tell him kicking duties aren't his?
It also speaks volumes that a side that looked knackered after 20 mins and were a man down for the last ten still did enough to largely keep us at bay, and we only scored after they had gone over.
Salford are a decent team, and results suggest this year they'll finish top 8 as they should have last year.
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