What are people's opinion of their appointment? There appears to have been very little reaction to them. Are people totally underwhelmed? Does anyone expect them to do well, or simply steady the ship on a temporary basis? No one seems to have much confidence or excitement going into tomorrows game, given that these ate very similar to the sides that took to the field in the GF when saints were the better side, should we expect more? Or has the confidence Leeds gained from the win elevated them from last seasons underachievers (GF excepted) to a level above us?

Hard to judge an unknown quantity, without a ball being kicked or a pass being made. We have no track record to go on and we don't have any form to carry over from the previous regime.

I do honestly think that they will drop the players that are making bad errors week after week.
If they can get that right then we are half way there.

Simmons dropped players after errors, we need more than that!

I'll let you know in about 3 weeks' time. Utterly impossible to judge whether this will work or be an unmitigated disaster at this stage with 2 total unknown quantities in charge. I still maintain we'd almost certainly have been better off soldiering on with Royce for the rest of the season unless stuff behind the scenes really did make both his and Purtill's positions completely untenable. I guess time will tell if I'm wrong or not.

Royce needed to go, the players had obviously lost faith in him and attendances would have started falling, costing the club 100's of 1000's.
Putting Rush in charge, but adding KC as assistant is clever, a very astute man who knows the players and a club legend the fans will get behind and forgive a few failings (but not too many). Eammon should be scouring the globe with his chequebook for the best (and it pains me to say it) Maguire clone there is availiable. That guy took an average wigan side to the top, and we need a man like that

And what evidence do you have of that?


Yeah, real logic there. Put a coach inexperienced at this level with an assistant who has yet to get his badges into the coaching roles just as we are about to hit our three most difficult matches purely based on the fact that they are home boys. The fans will be just as impatient with those two as they would with any other coaching set up. In fact, if it goes Pete Tong then Keiron could have his godlike status well and truly destroyed.


Why? I thought people wanted Saints to play a Warrington style of footie? You won't get that from a Maguire clone. I sincerely hope that isn't the direction our chairman is looking. I'd prefer a Smith style myself. If we are suddenly going to have this wonder team then I'd really like them to play like Warrington. I'd enjoy watching them then.

that i'll give you, warrington's style of play is great. But my general point is Maguire took a poorly performing team and without any change of personel created a team of champions. As i've always said Boring winning beats exciting losing evry time. (exciting winning is of course preferable)

So those three from Melbourne Storm were just ghosts then?

Wigan were on the cusp for a few years. They just needed nudging over the line, which is what Maguire did. But man did he create a boring team to watch. I'd rather have exciting losing than watching that every week. But then you and I have consistently diverged on that point.

This. (In response to the OP)

they came a year after they won the league, or had you forgot that?

That's true, they did. My bad. I had forgotten, yes.

But I stand by my other point. Wigan were on the cusp before Maguire came over. Do you not remember us kicking them out of the playoffs at Knowsley Road based on a dubious call from the ref on Longy's try saving tackle over the touchline? Another ref would have called it a second effort. They were far from rubbish when Maguire came over. Maguire just did for Wigan what Anderson did for us. He tightened them up in defence and gave them set pieces which they executed well, over and over and over again.

And IMO thats all we're missing at the moment

sorry are we talking about the saints style of rugby, we have just lost our way some what

Defence? Our defence was fine against Hull and Bradford. Take a look at the final scores for confirmation of that (and bear in mind that most of the points conceded were conceded by Foster, so that's one player's errors).

Our attack came together last season after our defence so there was no reason to believe that wouldn't happen again this season. Our errors and lack of discipline kept killing us in that respect. And our lack of on-field leadership - nobody willing to take up the mantel from the now absent Jammer.

Yes, since Smith is Warrington's coach.

I'm sorry but we do not have the players to replicate Warrington's style of rugby, regardless of who is coaching.

I disagree, our defence is poor, it's been poor all year. Fair enough we've tightened it up in last two weeks but we are still missing tackles, we can't defend our line when under pressure and we've looked all at sea.

Yeah, sure, that's why we conceded 30 plus points against Hull and Bradford.

I agree really. Our goalline defence this season has been pretty poor. Everytime a team gets within 20m of our tryline the nerves set in.

Our defence has been crap!

Even the bulls cut us up at times and they had 10 players out injured and their main attacking player sammut out suspended.

I'd we defend like we did last week or they way we did against hull then I predict Wigan and Warrington would put 40+ on us.

The defence is all at sea, massive overlaps and our goal line defence has been as bad as I've seen since I started watching saints.

Whenever I hear the name "Alex Murphy" I never think of the player widely regarded as the greatest of all time in either code who spearheaded the rise of my club from utter mediocrity to becoming the greatest club in the game. I instead can only ever think of the beleaguered failure sitting on the sidelines shouting ineffectually at his team as they were overwhelmed and babbling semi-coherently in post-match interviews about it all. Please let this not ever happen to KC too...

Did you watch Saints under Millward? Presumably not!



Clearly you didn't watch the Hull and Bradford games either. Our defence was much improved.

Bradford's missing players are worse than the ones they had on the pitch against us (bar Sammut). They could do with their missing players remaining absent for the rest of the season. They may get somewhere then.

As for Wigan and Warrington (and Leeds) they are simply better teams than we are. Well, Warrington and Leeds are anyway. It wouldn't matter how good our defence was, they have the players and the experience to undermine it. Particularly if Meli is on the wing on Sunday. Christmas again for Sinfield!

Exactly. I do hope McManus realises just what pressure he has heaped upon his home boys and what failure might do to at least one of them.

Why harp back to the millward era which was god knows his many years back. I watched saints long before millward arrived.

The defence was still a total mess against bulls and hull. The is no organisation at all and a good attacking team will destroy us if we defend like that.

We are averaging aprox 23 points against per game Which isn't good enough when our coach stated he'd wants it at 14 per game.

Any team that moves the ball wide causes is trouble big time.

Do you think Mr. Teflon will accept any responsibility?