It should be noted that the average age of the team we put out today was 22.

Just something to put into the mitigating circumstances file.

Excellent point. Well made.

Certainly enough to make you stop and think before ploughing on with feeling everything seems to be wrong right now?

More so if you add in Minorman's thread about us having only about 20 fit players left in the squad

I said the same thing to a fan who was slagging the players yesterday. To br honest the futute is looking bright. Bateman definitely looks the part.

I was really impressed with Donaldson too yesterday.

Whitehead was great. Those dummies were top drawer.

His defence is immense but looked better in attack. He'd of scored that break if he'd not just come back from injury.

I don't know who was more suprised with them, fax or him!

I was thinking about the age of the squad this morning on the drive in to work.

If, and I know this a big IF, we had been going ok in the table and had no injuries and Potter had chosen to rest Kearney, Ainscough, Scruton, Diskin, Elima, Langley, Sykes, Addy going into the game yesterday, would we have had this level of doom?

OK, there would have been groans about the defence (and rightly so) but it would have also been pointed out that a large part of the team either still qualifies for the academy / U20's or have come through our junior ranks.

We were also disrupted by injuries to both centres in Walker and Platt, which when you have 4 forwards on the bench can be a bit of a issue to re-organise.

Game-time for O'Brien, Bateman & Burgess would have been applauded.

You need a fair amount of luck to win the challenge cup, (Wire seem to have a hold on it all at the minute looking at the last few draws), and although a cup run can be great, personally us going out fairly early when we're struggling for numbers won't be the end of the world, and, if we somehow beat Wigan, how much confidence will it give to those lads who pull it off?

You're lucky to have 20 fit players. We went into the Hull game with 17 fit players, thanks to Josh Perry returning. We lost one during the match. We got Flannery back for Sheffield, giving us 17 fit players again and we lost three during the match. We now have no halfbacks at all and no fullbacks. At Hull we fielded seven players aged 21 and under.

And you still keep winning. Once more proving how poor we really are.

17?

Luxury. We trained for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank.

Or how good Saints are.

Glass is half empty to me. Sorry.

I've certainly noticed!

I predict Leeds signing one of Donaldson or whitehead in the off season maybe with the bulls taking players and or cash in exchange. too good to not be at a better club. maybe huaraki or cross going the other way?

Surely no-one would be stupid enough to swap Donaldson or Whitehead for Ben Cross? He's garbage.

Do you want Sykes? He can play both!

I would be inclined to agree but he has impoved very much in the last month or so but he is down the pecking order at Leeds.

And the bulls are the kings of signing journeymen unwanted by their clubs?

You mean, in a Jimmy Lowes sort of way?

No I ment in a matt diskin, chev walker, Ian sibbitt, patrick ah van, mark Herbert, Ben Jeffries sort of way?

23-year old Patrick Ah Van and 24-year old Marc Herbert are journeymen?

hopefully that prediction is wrong :p

If they can look as good against SL opposition as they did against Halifax we need to be making sure we can make those two players the core of our back row for a long time.