superleague.co.uk/report/10074 not pretty veiwing, Roby did 60 tackles and more mtrs than any forward Jones had a decent game too Lance had a bloody nightmare

superleague.co.uk/report/10074 not pretty veiwing, Roby did 60 tackles and more mtrs than any forward Jones had a decent game too Lance had a bloody nightmare

Welcome back the real lance, we missed you.

Wello missed SIX tackles! Six!

And how crap were our forwards? So very, very crap. Yet Brown in his post match gubbins has criticised only his 'back three'. Idiot.

I got the impression Wello and Brown didn't want to launch into public criticism at this crucial stage of the season. Understandable, I suppose, but their comments didn't ring true at all.

Wellens is a complete liability defensively. He was dropping off tackles all night and that 6 doesn't even include the ones where he was dummied and walked past.

We need to stick a fork in Wello he's done

I thought for much of the game he was at least trying to make things happen in our attack. But most of the time players around him looked clueless. In the 4th quarter of the match, he did start looking shambolic, though.

One thing that did strike me was that our aggression wasn't controlled or channelled positively. We put in a few cheap shots, whilst on many occassions not fronting up in the collision where we need that aggression.

If it was a game earlier in the year I'd drop them and put the kids in. But we have to be fair, it was the backs who kept dropping ball after ball.

The forwards can't do anything but tackle if the backs are dropping all the balls.

It's no point saying look at the meters made, look at the number of carries very few and far between and that's because our forwards spent most of their time and energy defending only for the backs and Mose to drop the ball when we had the chance.

Couldn't agree more

Wires plan was simple.

Exploit Saints lack of mobility amongst our big forwards.

Time after time Russell jumped in at dummy half and scooted. He beat the first marker nearly every time.
This meant Saints defence was on the back foot for most of the game. With Warrington on the front foot this allowed Monaghan to orchestrate his forwards into running through holes. Further stretching Saints defence and keeping us on the back foot.

On the 6th tackle with good field position wires view was to starve Saints of possession by forcing dropouts. This then denied us the opportunity to attack and forced us to expend yet more energy defending.

When we did get field position we were capable of exposing Warrington. However Wires tactics and orchestration of them was so good that we rarely got a sniff.

As has happened at other times this season, once a side got two scores up against Saints. The Saints players heads went down and we folded.

I put some of the errors down to the pressure we felt in the game.
Very few of this side have any big game experience. I think only Wello and Roby have picked up any gongs. The rest don't know what its like to win something, or even win big matches with something at stake.
That's one of the reasons why I think that it was essential to win the league leaders this year. Its not much of a trophy but it can and should be used as a springboard to bigger and better things.
As things stand I think Castleford will win it this year. We will fail miserably in the playoffs.

Next season without any half backs at the start of the year we will struggle. The new format will mean all sides will come out flying. This will be especially true of the likes of Wigan, Leeds and Warrington, who will show how much better than us they really are.

I thought Wellens was horrendous last night and seeing those stats, wow. I don't think I've seen many individual performances as bad as that. He won't play as bad as that ever again. 9 metres made, 2 errors, 6 missed tackles?! Shocking, absolutely shocking.

Hohaia isn't that far off either, another shocker of a performance.

Last night just confirms that we're pretty much done this year. When put under any real pressure we have folded and all those issues in earlier season games agaianst Catalans, Wire @ Magic weekend, Hull KR, Leeds in the cup & Good Friday have surfaced again.

Wello was really struggling to handle Westwood defensively.

Offensively he was being used as our left sided pivot, however his lack of pace meant Wire players just allowed him the inside line, knowing that if he took the gap they could cover across and tackle him. The end result was the left sided three quarters never got space to move in as they were always covered.

Yet again Roby 60 tackles - ridiculous . He's probably our biggest offensive threat but doing so much work is restricting him.
I'd like to see how many breaks Clark at Cas would make having made 60 tackles.
Whilst last nights tackle stats are above average for most due to the amount of defending we did - the workload needs to be shared more .

Exactly. Mose dropped the ball twice. So why just focus on the backs? Makinson dropped it twice and McDonnell once. Swift didn't drop it at all. Given that McDonnell was playing with a broken jaw, so must have been in lots of pain, I'd excuse him one dropped ball.

Did Brown mention Wello's missed tackles (the highest number of misses in the team)? Or the cheap shots our forwards put on? Or the useless metres our forwards made? Nope. Just criticised the 'back three' who made a total of three errors between them.

They've never been dealt with in spite of all the pseudo public hand wringing.

I blamed all the backs from 1-7 + Mose.

Every single back dropped the ball. Apart from maybe Jones who managed to give a head high shot on the floor.

We are going to burn him out

When did Swift drop the ball?

He didn't. The exception that proves the rule.

Typical that the guy who was dropped for defensive frailties is the only back who made no errors.

To be honest I thought he did, but looks like I must have just imagined it from the stats

I'm afraid that ship has sailed

Although Wellens was one of the worse players, for what its worth Wellens created our 2 trys otherwise it could have been 39-0 close to the Catalan standard.

To be fair, either Carney or Wells pointed out Wires tactic of bringing the quick backs into play around the ruck to run at forwards. Given the way we "went big" against leeds the week before, it was a good tactic to use.

That just happened to be the way they did it though, most tactics would have worked, given the way we coughed up possession and, as you say, completely folded (embarrassingly) when we should have been trying to make a come back.

Dux and I were texting during the game and he pointed out our complete lack of organisation at the ptb when defending. At one point, under our stick, Jones creamed the wire player (Hill, I think) and dumped them on his back. Should have been a dominant tackle, but second later, Soliola's rolling round on the floor while Hill's up on his feet and playing the ball. Next thing is they're running against an unorganised defence and they're over. When Brown was at Huddersfield, wrestling and getting an upper hand at the ruck was something he was known well, and the likes of him and McGuire were being criticised for their negative, yet effective tactics. Where's that now? We never seem to have control of the ruck?

If you watch Wigan, they tend to get up from the grounded player one defender at a time. That way there is always a marker already pretty much set before the attacker can even attempt to get onto his feet. When we complete a tackle, everyone gets up at once, so that you've effectively got an even race to see who can stand up the quickest. We need to be more co-ordinated at the ruck in order to stack the odds in our favour and stop our opponents playing at whatever speed they like.

Let's not forget that LH is a world cup winner.

Have spotted that too, we really do strugglewith basics in defence sometimes.

The annoying thing is we clearly know what the right things to do are, as we've done them on a number of occasions this year. Hair pullingly inconsistent.