Like I said. You got territory and possession from dropped balls and penalties. Your forwards did nothing with either and neither did your backs.

The forwards weren't our problem yesterday, it was the backs not taking the chances.

Our forwards definitly dominated, you were probably looking at Graham and Roby who were targeted. Meanwhile Tony P, Flannery, Soliola and Moore made plenty of half breaks and momentum, unfortunately the Wigan defence were impressive in defending the last 10 mins.

Our lateral passing across the back line was poor, so you were correct on that one.

I,m just wondering if Eastmond had played if that would have pepped up our backline, we will never know.

Makinson looked to have some pace on him, but Saints just never went right. Whether this was because they were targeting Deacon/J Tomkins/Charnley or avoiding Finch/Carmont/Richards I'm not certain.

Charnley also made Meli look pedestrian in defence a few times, his two breaks both came from Meli getting turned inside out.

Speaking of turned inside out, I can't remember a player looking as confused as Wellens on Charnley try...

The wello turning his back thing was right in front of me and I was in shock St how poor wello looked.

Agree with most of this but not your comments on Shenton.
I and all the fans around me commented on Shenton's great defence, he looked really up for it. in attack he got hardly any ball due to our obsession of feeding everything through lean who for reasons best known to him never moved away from our left hand side.

In fact if you look at our two tries the first one was created by Shneton's half break (the second by robys dart down the middle) neither were created directly through the left. It just shows that the first time we tried anything different, and less predictable it worked.

The quater final when Charnley made Hodgson look like a turnstyle.

You dominated possession not us. When you have so much possession you really need to put points on the board because sure as chips is chips, it will eventually swing back. I'd go so far as to say, had Wigan had the amount of possession you had, we'd have scored more than 30.

Watching Charnley in full flow is awesome, great prospect.

This is the same charnley who was nowhere to be seen/ out of position when meli/foster turned him inside out for two tries?

Yes Charnley is hopeless defensively, like watching a high school winger at times, good point.

Joel came out of the line for the first then took them both to stop Meli for the second.....hardly defensively poor.

Just wrong mate. Charnley came in off his wing like a 10 year old.

For the reasons I posted above.....

I've said all season that Charnley's defensive partnership with Joel is a huge liability. He doesn't seem to have the confidence or the communication to stick to his wing. But my god, I can almost forgive him for that weakness as long as he keeps scoring tries like he has the last few weeks. After all, his defense can improve (and slowly is doing, I think).

Or if its my school team, its about 7 of the team that are hopeless defensively!

Only read the first page of the thread so it may have been mentioned already but re. Wigan being 'lucky' with injuries, has it occured to you that perhaps we are the fittest and best conditioned side in SL?

It's no secret how hard a pre-season the Wigan lads have gone through for the past few years, or how highly rated our fitness staff are.

I find it amazing the number of injuries other teams (including and indeed especially Saints) get that aren't necessarily the result of a contact sport, but more of players not being in good enough condition to participate at the highest level. Muscle and ligament injuries are a prime example.

I was just shocked that he did that. I thought Wello had a very poor game yesterday given that he had a very good game last week. I was disappointed in him.

I think some of shouting and frustration he was taking out on the ref was brought on by his own performance.

I agree with that and providing he continues to score super tries; madge and co can always work on his defence which is pretty poor as you say especially in combination with a centre who isn't a centre.

cant remember Rads ever looking so poor, even when he came back and played for free, a year out of the game, 2 dodgy knees, still didnt look as poor as Wello on Saturday.

sad to see.

Without any doubt, was a fantastic game, our defense was the difference, against another side Saints would have won easily.

Our defence was outstanding (again) and that was the difference between two great sides.

Just sorry it can't be us both having a great day out at Wembley.

Well done to our lads, and well played Saints.

I haven't read all the pages, but this is my take.
Our high completion rate in such a high pressure game was impressive. So was our ability to force repeat sets.
The reason we couldn't score was partly due to facing a good defense, but it was also that we seem to be creeping down the road of always taking the same option in attack, which is a problem compounded by the fact that option means the ball is dying in Wello's hands. I'm not saying we'd have had a hat full, but I reckon we may have maganed 1 or 2 extra tries if Eastmond was attacking in that position.

The other thing is that we seem to play a bit better when the pressure's off. LMS had a good game all round, but once we were 18 points down, twice he banged the ball up with extra venom and put a guy on their . Soliola did the same. We then went on to score two good free flowing tries.

Wigan are a better team. Not 17 better players. They have a better defence and when they move the ball wide in attack, they have a variety of options to take which they utilise so that each runner is a valid option.

Our season had a mixed start. Royce had a number of problems including family issues and Eastmondgate. I'd sugest we're 6 weeks behind where Royce would realistically like us to be and that if things had been a little different we could be looking at a team performing 5% better and maybe sneaking a win in situaions like Saturday.
Defence remains a bit of a question mark, but I think Silverware is a perfectly feasible possibilty under Simmons.

50 tackles with no misses? He was one of the hardest working player on the pitch.

He also forced several repeat sets with his short kicking game whilst the kicking game of all around him was falling apart.

Anonymous? Utter poppycock.