The grade f was apparently for picking the player up after smashing him in the face
The grade f was apparently for picking the player up after smashing him in the face
This will be a tough game. We need big Al for go forward. Roby should put us on the front foot and Lomax & Coote to do the honours.
The level of stick Woolf gets on here is ludicrous. You’d think we were missing out on the play-offs.
Hope he and the team make a few eat their words this weekend.
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I'm not entirely sure what you mean. If you believe that a great many on here want his & our team to lose on Friday to prove a point then I think you're off the mark. I don't need to go into it all again but he's accountable for this seasons drop off in collective team performance, tactics, team selections & indeed entertainment levels. I also believe he's accountable for the plateauing and in many cases the drop off in performance levels of every single player save perhaps Bentley who has been on an upwards trajectory I'd suggest driven by his own efforts.
Friday may not be the time to throw caution to the wind as it's a knock out game, if it was required at some stage of the game to recover a situation he still wouldn't be capable of supporting his team to deliver it. Fact is he should win something this year however through his inept decisions we so far have not. If we win which I believe we should do, it'll be in spite of him and not because of him.
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The first point (and possibly most important one) is that just because someone is not as good as Holbrook, doesn't make them a moron worthy of daily abuse.
Secondly - if Holbrook had remained in charge, with the WCC to contend with, Luke Thompson gone and more injury problems than we've had in a while - we would not have finished 16 points ahead.
And we do not play in a vacuum - the team that has finished above us has a young pack that was blooded last year and suffered through that but has improved. They added top players like Hastings and French who have transformed them. The gap last year was not just reflective of how strong we were but of how poor the competition was.
In 2019 we finsihed with a remarkable PD of +521 over 29 games. This year our 306 over 18 games would make +493 over 29 games. Attack is slightly weaker and defence slightly stronger. Yes the fixture list has been strange so comparisons like this difficult but let's be clear, we are no mugs this year.
As for doing "worse" in the CC - both Holbrook and Woolf lost against Wire, when we drew them seems irrelevant as the problems in the squad under Holbrook with Fages at 7 remain the same under Woolf. I would argue we were far more unlucky with injury (including in-game) in the 2020 loss than 2019 and that the 2019 instalment against a Wire team with no halves was an ENORMOUS bottle job at Wembley whilst 2020 was not.
It remains to be seen whether Woolf's approach to defence will pay dividends in the play-offs. People will reference the recent Wigan game but how would Holbrook have fared with Walmsley and Thompson removed from his front row?
To be clear I am not saying Woolf is a better coach than Holbrook. He may go on to be a more succesful coach for us, he may not. What I am saying is that he is deserving of a lot more respect than he is often afforded on here. Let's remember, Holbrook was one game away from essentially leaving the club as a failure in trophy terms - some might say he was very fortunate to be facing Salford in that make or break game.
It's the tone that gets me - it is the opposite of supportive, even when it comes to his choice to play young lads like Welsby. Some make their points in a rational way I can appreciate and often agree with, some behave like spoilt brats expecting another cakewalk and ignoring context.
Last edited by FearTheVee; 17th November 2020 at 09:14.
Fully agree, as I,ve mentioned many times Woolf inherited a knackered team in the seasons first quarter and for all the season he has lost Thompson one of the best strike forwards and Percival .one of the best strike centres. It took the second quarter to get back Roby, Taia and Coote back to fitness when that happened we blew everyone off the park and went on something like a 10 match winning run in the league.
I think the sniping at Woolf and you could probably add Welsby to that is ridiculous, it all tastes of "fickleness fans" thinking they can play the same as last year when they should get real..................it's not going to happen. An earlier suggestion to that we can ged rid of Woolf if he wins a Grand Final is a disgrace, what happened to the ethos of support your team win or lose and support the shirt and not the player.
Woolf is a different coach to Holbrook and Woolf's tough exterior is probably not attractive to some shallow fans. If we had Holbrook this season and some fans think we could win the league by a massive points margin and get to every final, then welcome to cuckoo land.
I respect your points . And in the most part I agree that the ‘tone’ or the ‘Woolf Our mentality is perhaps not helpful .
I supported Woolf and sat on the fence due to how hampered he had been with various issues. It took me to the second Wakefield game to hit home that our direction and general performance is much, much worse than the last couple of years and Woolf was to blame .
The team has regressed , individual performances are hit and mis and players have been given ‘new’ roles and playing a less important role in attack . Coote for example would have been in most people’s top 3 MOM almost every game , he has been almost invisible this year.
Knowles is there to tackle and nothing more ( he is one of the best ball handling forward in the game) The Team have been directed in a certain way which has created less affective Outcomes . The coach in my view is at fault .
Warrington have missed their chance this year . On average , they have been the most threatening team and this genuinely could have been their year had they got organised . This says how far we have regressed . This Wigan team that embarrassed us is probably the worst Wigan team in 20 years .
Woolf in my eyes is not utilising his players in the most effective manner. His style is very easy to defend against . If we donÂ’t blow a team away in the first 20 we really struggle , when a team decide to turn up, we have problems hence the losses we have succumb to . Continue on this path and 2nd maybe all we can hope for next year .
This is why people are perhaps getting irritated , remember KC ? There is a tense feeling we could be revisiting this again .
Going forward , it appears we have made some good signings next year . IÂ’m sure KW will be aware that things have not been so smooth . So , I feel that we should allow him the time and give him our support but , allow people to be vocal if things are not ok and so far , itÂ’s clear that we are less than ok .
I hope like you he will prove everyone wrong . If we turn up on Thursday and play the same style like we did against Wigan, Wire , and Wakefield and go on to get beat IÂ’ll be disappointed in WoolfÂ’s vision .
My post earlier on wasn’t a suggestion to get rid of Woolf if we win the grand final, it was more a sense of realism for those thinking he could be sacked. It was simply pointing out that the fastest way out of the club for Woolf would be success. The problem for Woolf is that lasting impressions were made in the first few weeks of the season and some people just won’t change their minds now.
Like it or not a lot of the rugby we play is dull and the tactics are more to grind the opposition down and force errors. This would be fine but we’ve had 3 big games this year (WCC, CC quarter final, LLS decider) and those tactics have been completely ineffective in all 3 games. Come up against an organised, committed defence and we look blunt with no discernible plan B. It’s one of the reasons everyone is so glad Warrington are out, they seem to be able to match us in the pack on the day and then outplay us in the backs.
Forwards win games. The backs decide by how much.
Really well put FTV.
I've no problem with criticism of the playing style and/or coaching decisions.
However the personal attacks and unsubstantiated statements about the players views are just not needed.
Probably summed up by the view that if we don't end up Champions it's the coach's fault and if we do it's despite him....
Equally the rose tinted view of Justin's tenure is interesting. Wembley was possibly one of the worst performances I've seen watching Saints (possibly a thread in itself there...) & Last year's GF was by no means flowing open rugby.
Next year - hopefully when we can take out some of these frustrations from the terraces - looks really interesting and I'll take survival of the club and the league above whatever pans out from this season.
I'd go with this, I hope woolf wins trophys as head coach here we all do. I don't dislike him or want to see him take any abuse. Personally I don't like his style of rugby and I haven't enjoyed watching the team this year but if he wins a grand final I won't care and he will be rightly deemed a success.
If we end up trophy less and in the main having played pretty boring and unenjoyable rugby with the group of players we have then he is going to get criticised and rightly so imo. The guy understand that is par for the course for the job he is in and will expect nothing less
Couldn't agree more. If at the start of the season someone had said you'll have no Percival and essentially no Thompson for the majority I don't believe people on here would have been saying we will still win the league with ease. Woolf can improve, without question, but lets see what happens in the next two weeks first.
As I've highlighted in a previous thread, in the 4 games we have played against what should be considered as our two main rivals (Wigan and Wire), we have only won one and that was against the Wigan kids team.
They both know what we are going to do and easily nullify our attack. When this happens we have no Plan B.
I think that thing that is going in Woolf's favour this season that finally accounted for KC, is that games are being played behind closed doors with no crowd's getting on his back, booing (rightly or wrongly) the boring grind or a drop in attendances as people can't be bothered to turn up as the one dimensional play is so boring to watch.
Whether we win the Grand Final or not, once the doors to the stadium are open again, it may be like a false dawn in as much as people will just want to watch live rugby again regardless of how boring it may be. It may have been a totally different story in the doors had been open this season.
I’ve never had a problem with this point of view, you express it well and it certainly has some validity. But I think you go too far in characterising some of Woolf’s critics. None of us think we should have finished 16 points clear, especially not after 10 less games. None of us think it was ideal having Percival out and losing Thompson. None of us think it was ideal having the lockdown and a weird second half of the season with restrictions in place everywhere. I don’t think anybody is even saying that 2020 should have been as fun as 2019 either.
But, it should have been better than it was. We should have finished top of the pile, even if by only a small margin. We should have been more exciting to watch, and at the very least it should look like we are using what happened last year as the basis for what we wanted to do this season instead of looking like we wanted to rip up the blueprint completely.
It would be like Liverpool bringing in Tony Pulis and opting for long balls. They’d still win a lot more than they’d lose, they’d still be near the top but they’d be up there because they had good players and not because the system was brilliant. But eventually (or quickly maybe) people will ask why they’re doing it when they have the best team and just won the league playing good stuff.
You are right however about supporting the shirt and not the player, it’s something I’ve always tried to do. We follow the club more than anything, and players and coaches come and go but we and the club remain. Wanting the club to achieve things has always been more important than wanting a certain coach or a player to achieve things for us. However, aside from me being born and raised in St Helens there is something else that makes me love our club, and that is the style of RL I saw when I was a kid. It’s overly romantic to say we should always entertain, but when we have the best team and have seen our team be the best team whilst also being entertaining it is difficult for me to get on board with what we’ve been in 2020 for the most part.
We have the best team but have been dragged down by negative tactics. Look at the signings for 2021, this isn't some ‘we’ll get through the pandemic and then let rip next year’ kind of thing, it’s a ‘we’ll continue ramming it down the middle with bigger forwards in 2021’ kind of thing. This is us under this coach, and yes, we’ll win a lot more than we lose, and we may win trophies (I’ve never said we wouldn’t under Woolf) but anyone who looks at it constructively will wonder why we’ve opted for this when the alternative (playing a good style of RL) worked well for us in the last year or two. The season is long, maybe too long, and when league wins only mean so much in a play off system we need to enjoy the journey from week to week. Playing Woolf’s style won’t harm us too much in terms of points and trophy chances, and I’ve always gone to great lengths on here to say that we could win things under him. But it’ll harm us in the long run because less people will want to watch it, less people will enjoy it and we’ll be giving off yet another sign that as a club and as a fanbase we no longer care about our reputation and our culture for playing a creative and exciting brand of RL. We’ve appointed one coach in 15 years that actually cared about attacking RL, and we’ve repeatedly sold ourselves short in this department. This is what bothers me more than most, and once the excitement of getting back to LP next year subsides we’ll see crowds fall back watching Woolf’s tactics. If we were Hull KR, do whatever it takes to get a win, but St Helens, with this team? Surely we have to hope for more than this.
We will win on Friday, and I think we’ll win the GF, because I believe we have the best team. I also think we may win it again next year under Woolf, but I also believe the 7-8 months that lead up to it will be mind numbing compared to how they could be. My issue isn’t that Woolf will cost us trophies, it is that he will cost us a lot more in terms of where the club go after him. There may not be another Holbrook out there in 2022 to get everyone back enjoying watching Saints again, and if we win two titles under Woolf will the club even look for him? I don’t want Woolf to be the blueprint for every coach that comes after him, because a shiny pot after 8 months of tedium isn’t worth it for me. It may be to some, that’s fair enough, but the journey has to be as fun as the destination.
This is a much better post in my view. KC broke my heart & this coach is doing the same. I don't know him as a person I've no need I don't want to. My views reflect on him as a full time, highly paid professional coach. Could I do better, probably not but then I excelled at other things in life (according to others). I was criticised if my performance wasn't at standard and rewarded when it was. If the team I was responsible for didn't deliver or didn't display the required behaviours of the business in driving success and were not appropriately developed in the changing needs of the business I'd have been out. Some of my team left for one reason or another, I dismissed some in line with protocols and others left for better opportunities. Not once in my extended career did my boss on behalf of the shareholders say under performance was ok because a couple of my team had left.
If you support the shirt as has been said then I find it incredulous that you're accepting of what we have at the club. We have mundane boring rinse & repeat performances. Not one, zero, zilch game plays that are new or innovative. I've no problem with a team building a platform through the forwards but it should do so to then allow the backs to exploit opportunities. This clearly isn't happening. We seem content to plough another furrow but deeper next time. We hardly see anyone playing heads up rugby, instead we employ set plays that mostly consist of single point attacks, the backs are expected to mimic this single plan. He continues to select players not performing and so blow apart any semblance of performance management of the individual. It's plainly unacceptable. I see comments about the players are playing for him, he's lost Thommo & Percy, it doesn't matter, his job is to absorb that and bring others through to compensate. In bringing them through he has to give guidance & support, give them challenges to enhance their skills and their pride in their own improved performance. I see none of this happening.
I hope we win the next two games because I think the club as a whole & the town itself needs a lift. KW will undoubtedly take great pride in his part of any Grand Final success and it's appropriate to employ any game plan he so wishes to win both of these games. It is also appropriate for us supporters to accept the decisions he makes in what is the last chance of success this season. It is also very much appropriate for me and others to critique and/or criticise what happened should we fail.
This is pro sport remember, not voluntary stuff down the park on Sunday morning.
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