Just had txt, robes suspected broken hand, season could be over

If his season is over then it really is over for us.

That's what Wigan speccies are saying about their team too.

But there pack walks all over ours everytime we play.

It was a good game to watch today. Unfortunately it was also a horrible spectacle when you realised one of the teams in it was Saints. It was very much a bottom of the table clash, it had the air of a relegation decider with two desperate teams playing terrible stuff at times.

Their trio of Mathers, Sykes and Smith was better than Wellens, Hohaia and Lomax with ease. Smith in particular made us look stupid at times, his kicking game was such a danger and we never looked capable of holding them out. Their pack with such luminaries as Mariano, Raleigh and Johnson got the better of ours.

Most worrying thing though is the defending. It's utterly rubbish, we have no organisation and no aggression. There is no commitment to keep a side out at all. We don't have a captain or a leader who can say a few words and wake the team up, Wello is such a negative factor as captain. Throw a Graham, Cunningham or Sculthorpe in there today and we'd have won, not for the quality of their play, just for their leadership. He was just nowhere in defense again today, we're playing with 12.

Positives? Very, very few. Meli in attack, LMS at times? I just can't wait for this season to finish.

Very poor display from us today, we didnt do the little things right and turned the ball over far too cheaply...

After their first drop goal effort, we decided to give them the back back around the half way mark with first Laffranchi then Gaskell coughing the ball up when we should have been respecting it not throwing stupid offloads.

Moving Lance to 9, Roby to 13 and Gaskell to 6 was a mistake imo, we lost direction round the park due to the inexperience of the halves and nullified our 2 best attacking options (other than Meli) up to that point with Roby moving away from the ruck and also Lance made a couple of good line breaks form first receiver.

Our defence looked too easily broken and for all the Jon Wilkin critics I think today highlighted how much graft he does get through when he plays. Between him and Sia it must be an average of about 80 tackles a game that we need to make up for and the guys coming in didnt do enough to compensate for this.

Our kicking game is non existent, and for some reason thought it would be a consistently good idea to put the ball high up in the air to Fox and Mathers and not have anybody challenging them to try to win the ball.

Moan over, I think the Wire game took a lot out of the tank for us (especially the defence we had to get through on our own line in the first 20 mins) and we looked tired. TP looks to be carrying an injury and if so he needs to be rested until fit as he doesnt look anywhere near as effective at the start of the season. I would rather have this dip in form now than in 4 weeks and we have got time now to pick ourselves back up and build momentum for the playoffs. If Roby has broken his hand and is done for the season it will be a massive blow for us, although Lomaskell in the halves got us to a GF last year and people have been calling for them all season to play so maybe that will give us a chance to see if they were right. We wrote ourselves off last season and then ended up beating Wigan twice in the playoffs to make the GF again so I wouldnt say season over just yet, we just need to learn from our mistakes today and work to correct them for Cas on Friday.

COYS

Because the players are just not being motivated to turn up and play to their capabilities. Those performances show what this squad of players [icould[/i be doing on a consistent basis if they got a rocket up their collective posteriors. I hope and pray that Brown is the man to do it... I'll say it again - there ain't much wrong with our current playing personnel, it just needs to be made to turn up and play more often.

Tell me about it...

On the positive side it more or less puts an end to my lingering fears of another O/T tonking coming our way.

It was an excellent game as suggested by all the commentators and jurnos. As ever you show yourself of for the bad loser and epically unknowledgeable RL fan you are.

It's to be hoped Wakefield never play someone when we are actually playing good Rugby, as I fear we'd run a hundred past them



Well done, biggest dummy spit of the year

Our squad? What about Wigan's? I mean, every single one of their forwards was monstered by Wire and so they're all obviously completely useless players and Wigan will never be able to compete for trophies at the top level relying on that utterly gutless, dominated pack of theirs. Get shut of them all and go digging in the back garden to see if there are any international quality forwards buried there who'll show some guts and aggression to replace them with instead I say. And as for that Tomkins? Useless!!! Didn't come up with [iany[/i game-winning plays at all in the entire game! Wigan will never challenge while they're relying on such an easily contained and toothless attacking player at full back! And the rest of their backs? Wire ran rampant over them! Garbage every single one of them. I don't know what's going wrong with Wigan's retention and recruitment, I really don't! They [iseriously[/i need to start offloading most of their squad and make some decent signings instead, and soon!!!

You are right in a sense but also very wrong. If you take the horrific standard of Super League at the moment, we're not that bad. If you compare us to Wigan, it's primarily a mental issue that prevents us competing with them. They out enthuse us and are too aggressive for us. That could be changed with a new coach and a new emphasis. But what Wigan and the likes of Leeds and Warrington, the teams that win the trophies, have that we don't is the individual stars. It's players like McGuire, Burrow, Tomkins, Briers, Westwood that raise their side above and win them trophies. We don't have that. Our only top level player is Roby and he's so easily shut down that he's no real benefit to us at all in the big games as the pack is always trounced and there is no momentum for him to work off.

To win another trophy (Barring a ridiculously easy run to a CC Final against another mediocre team) we need a new fullback, a new half back and a new prop. And we need to find some individual quality from somewhere as well. It sounds easy, but it's not likely that we'll do it anytime soon.

Re-read the very first sentence of my post, then re-think your post. At 33-32 there is little validity to any claims that it was a high quality game. I've praised Tim Smith and your creative trio and your attack in general. The defending on show, from both teams, was incredibly poor.

Entertaining? Yes, I said that in the first sentence. Poor quality? Most definitely.

I coudnt give a **** about wigans squad and what the hell as the comparison to our game with wolves and wigans game with wolves got to do With it? Wigan have tonked us 3 times this year!

You really do think all things saints are great don't you? You can't see thru your saints tinted specs just how poor we've become over the last 5 years. We are very lucky the the standard had dropped or we'd be way off the pace!

I Can picture you sat in your living room with saints wallpaper, looking at the pictures on the wall of scully, KC and longy, eating your tea on your saints plates, using saints knives and fork, with a saints tray on your knee while wearing you saints slippers.

Your saints PJs neatly folded on your saints bed covers, in your box room with saints wallpaper, the light on the room coming from your saints lamp, your book collection consisting of saints played biogs, you'll sit there all might writing out your greatest saints 17, using your saints pad, saints pen that you keep in your saints pencil case.

When most men have naughty magazines and naughty DVDs under the bed, you have saints programes (sticky pages), and old saints vids, the saints bid of wide to west is now a bad picture as its been played that often on them lonley nights when you've woke thinking off saints.

...but we were 20 minutes and a few incredibly unluckily timed injuries away from winning the GF last season with exactly the same dearth of "stars" (Graham excepted, but he's not a "match-winning" player per se in the sense you're alluding to).

Discuss.

And, as ever, where are these "stars" going to come from? Most of the players you refer to are approaching the end of their careers, and Wire, Leeds, Wigan et al will suffer as badly in trying to replace them as we have with Long, Scully etc. Superleague is gradually becoming a star-less environment - it's currently acting rather like the "Accelerating Universe" theory in fact. It may appear to superficially be growing bigger and more expansive, but it's stars are gradually fading and it will eventually consist of just black holes and clouds of gas.

Exactly true, couldnt have put it any better myself!

Good grief, man... You really do need to get out more....

It's called "parody" by the way, but your self-parody rather makes mine redundant...

We had Graham, prop box ticked. Leader box also ticked massively. We had Gaskell and Lomax playing well and combining in the halves, not that Kiwi joker we've had ruining things all season. Even then we relied on a batting collapse by a Wigan team with a departing coach to get there.

My point is that if we slowly get slightly worse every season, we're not really moving forwards are we?

I'm out now mate, these new things called iPhones allow me to go on the net while on the move.

I bet you've got a Saints mouse mat?

I'd love an iPhone but work will only give me some godawful Nokia and I refuse to carry 2 phones... My street cred really diminishes each time I whip it out of my trousers and show it to the cool kids. I feel so much less a man for it...



I don't actually use a mouse mat thanks (the arm of my nicely appointed Ikea sofa does quite nicely), but just for you I'll go looking for one in the smoking ruins of the club shop after you've finished leading that angry mob to burn LP down to the ground for not showing enough "ambition" in their signings. It's the only fate that would be worthy of them, damn their penny-pinching hides....

It's boring now and we ain't going to agree, do lets just leave it.

Be careful Pete or smallhampton will add you to his foes list.

Ikea Sofa ? This guy's got class

What a monumental bore you are - I'm so glad I'm not you

You wish you were me. Two random attacks with insults and it turns out I was right all along