Lots of criticism towards the players and rightly so but Price is not immune from criticism.

Lost two finals last season, if we finish trophyless again this season is it time for him to go? His style is dated and boring, his signings have been a bit of a joke barring Austin and Charnley. I'm in no means a 'Steve Price OUT' advocate however, the club need to be ruthless and things, as they stand, are nowhere near good enough.

I think we're in a bit of a mess, maybe even at the top of the club there needs to be a change. No trophies since 2012 and yet we have the biggest resources in the league. Simply not good enough.

I'm interested to hear people's opinions on this.

Unfortunately, our rugby being served up at present is about as enterprising as it was in the last days of Smith when we had to battle in the relegation zone. Luckily, there are worse teams than us in the comp.

I'm not a fan of Justin Holbrook. He reminds me of a smug neighbour whose gardens are immaculately manicured whilst yours have amazonian swathes of weeds running riot.

[iHowever[/i, give him his due - he has learnt from last years mistakes. He has replaced an irritant (Barba) with a much steadier player (Coote) and he is rotating his squad very effectively, something he refused to do last year.

In contrast, Price is beginning to look terminally stubborn. Westwood, Livett, Patton and the style of play are all issues that need resolving.

Put down your fiddle Pricey, your empire is burning.

In his defence he pulled no punches last night even towards himself. Someone has pointed out that its a good time to have a blip. I'm under no illusions the squad is not good enough and Saints are miles ahead but let's see how Priew reacts now. If he doesn't change personnel and some tactics then we're in trouble.

If he doesn't sign at least one top drawer prop and a centre in the off season he should be sacked for gross misconduct!

Very very strange season. We have served up some terrible performances that are worthy of relegation, recently. Our creativity has been extremely lacking, and were making too many howlers of errors.

Yet, were still second in the table with a 4 point advantage and a points difference, that effectively, makes it 5.
Saints are still evens to win the grand final with Sky bet, feel free to lump on if you think the season is a one horse race.

Our pack has been beaten and it's the brilliance of Austin and Clark that have sneaked us wins we simply shouldn't have had.
We desperate for a prop because when we're without Hill and Cooper we are toast. We can win SL with as we are but we need to go discipline and injury free.

Even with Cooper and Hill we’ve put in some bang average performances but agree with some on here that thank god the teams below us have been just as inconsistent.Not sure if Saints are going further away or the rest of the teams are going backwards.

He’s been found out. He was a massive failure in the NRL and he’s heading in the same direction at Warrington. His recruitment has been poor and his style of rugby would put a glass eye to sleep. Getting to two finals last year masked what was a very average season for you and those two final performances were dreadful. I hope he stays for years.

Lol.
Love it.

But that's quite reserved pal compared to the stuff we're posting.

Shame it's too late for you to stand for leader of the Tory party. With your vision and perspicacity the country would be in the sunlit uplands in no time.

Price is aware of the lack of forward punch we have, and he's clearly looking at adding some aggression to the pack. We just missed out on Kenny Edwards and he's an aggressive hard hitting forward. And if rumours are true we're looking at George Burgess, Price knows we need a better forward pack. He's sorted the halves for next year, he's looking at the centres and the forwards for next year also , so i'm happy to wait to see what we do next year. We won't win anything this year on our current form, and next year Price will have built the Squad he wants so if next year is a failure then i'll start to judge Price.

The trouble is, he recruited both Lama Tasi and Jason Clark, neither of whom make decent yardage. So the lack of mongrel / go forward in our pack is down to him. When Charnley helps out, he shows far more determination and grit than either of those two and probably makes more ground as well.

Thing is, a coach should bring more to the table than just purchasing the right players. All good/top coaches train an effective style of play to suit the majority of the squad. Even with new signings, most of that squad will be with us.

Knowing our pack isn't the strongest or biggest, why have our tactics been one diminsional down the middle? Aside from entertainment value, crisp well-timed passing and alternative attacking structures are an integral part of a side's nal. Also, two of our strongest players in the squad are our wingers, yet they hardly see any quality attacking ball. Surely it's not that hard to set up a deep line with some dummy runners or a run-around to create some space for them? Other teams with supposed lesser players have managed it. While Patton hasn't been great, surely he could have been taught, alongside the other players, to set up some attacking moves by Price/Briers. It begs the question, what have the players been doing in training apart from keeping fit?

The chance of us winning something this year are very low now as we haven't seen any improvement in these areas, in fact it's plateaued/regressed from an already low point. Unfortunately, saints have moved considerably further ahead in the past 2 years rather than us close the gap. I worry that we could get a tonking in one or both of the finals if we get there.

The odd thing is that we were making far more chances at the start of the season, he doesn’t seem to have worked out an effective game plan to cover Ratchford’s absence.

In the regular season things are never as good as you think when you’re in winning form (see our 2011 season, Saints last year or maybe this year), and are never as bad as you think when you’re in losing form.

Also never make your opinions based on small runs of games and especially not from individual games. They can be anomalies or inconsistencies.

Price has been here just 18 months and has made some good and some bad signings. He’s still working with a lot of players from Smith’s tenure who I didn’t think were performing in that last season with Smith or I would get rid of (maybe he will).

Ratchford Hughes Clark King Philbin and Lineham are all better players under Price than they were under Smith. Hill and Currie have gone the other way but that’s more to do with age and injury. And he’s brought in Charnley Austin Burrell and Widdop who long term could be great signings. While there have been some naff ones too.

We had a leaky defence in 2017 and he sorted that out. When we’re on it we have a mean defence.

He isn’t particularly giving youth players much of a chance, but are they even good enough? He’s let Livett go out on loan, but he was quite poor for us at times last season. We play a fairly boring style of rugby, but it got us to two finals in a season where I think we overachieved last year (I thought we were a 3rd/4th league placed, semi final level team yet we finished 2nd and got to both finals).

It’d be the end of next season before I start to say Price needs replacing, not if we win nowt this season!

We aren’t the best team in the country, we don’t have the best pack, the best back line, or the most creativity so why do people think we should be winning things? Saints had a better side than us last season and beat us to the LLS, Catalans had a better pack than us in the CC final last season and beat us, Wigan had more creativity across the pitch in last year’s GF and beat us.

For me it’s the same this year. Saints are better than us and are leading the way for the LLS, we pay Hull in the CC semi soon and they have a better back line than we do and more creativity, we may play them or Catalans come the Play-offs and Catalans have a better pack than we do. If we lose to these teams in the league, Cup and Play-offs this season then so be it. We aren’t a particularly good side despite having some good players.

I think we are performing overall about at the level we are. We are about a 2nd/3rd placed league team and a semi/final team. We’re on course for those things this season. We are going to be inconsistent with some of the players we have or injuries and lack of depth we have or lack of quality youth.

We can turn it on at times. Until we went down to 12 men in both games against St Helens, we were easily a match for them. But then we can have these terrible performances too. But it’s about turning it on in just four or five games all year in reality: CC semi, CC final, Play-off R1, Play-off semi, Grand Final. Anything before that is just doing enough to get into those games.

I think Price is doing a decent job. There is plenty of room for improvement. But let’s see where we are come the Winter eh?!

Sometimes there’s no replacement for individual talent.

Since Livett went to HKR, under Smith he has looked like what he is - a skilful, ball playing forward always likely to make a break or provide a defence splitting pass - it's one of the reasons I feel he should be starting in the halves.

This, of course, is under Smith's tutorage.

Under Price, Livett was often used as a one up plough down the middle forward expected to do donkey word rather than play to his strengths.

Frankly, I don't care if Livett has a bit of attitude. So did Roberts and he got picked every week regardless.

We won't improve our style or drag ourselves out of the glue with the likes of Tasi and ten minute masalla. We need players of skill. Get on the phone Steve

Perfectly put. Not happy with our 'style' at all. Which to be fair was already happening under Smith. We have not been threatening in the opponents twenty for about 5 seasons now.

I think you make some good points there within a very balanced view of the regular rounds of the season. But I don't think the signs look particularly good.

One of the problems we have is lack of go forward from the pack which has already been discussed / raised by several posters. Another issue is that we have too many forwards that are only impact players; BMM, Akauola, and probably Joe Philbin. So we have an unbalanced pack which only has go forward when Hill and Cooper are on the pitch. This problem has either been created by Price, or ignored by him, since he was involved in the recruitment of 5 of our current forwards.

Now, if you look at some of the crunch games we have played eg Catalans in the cc last year, Saints at home this year, you see that their tactics are to move up quickly when we have the ball. That significantly reduces the opportunity to get the ball to the edges where we can hurt the opposition through Ratchford, Charnley and Lineham. It also exposes our inability to get the ball back upfield into their 20-30m area. We need a strong pack to release the danger men in our side. Austin can not carry the whole weight of attacking responsibility on his own.

A second issue is the regular poor performance we see - normally against mid / lower league sides. We all know the signs; lots of unforced errors, a low tempo, and little support play. Every team can have an off day, but we have them regularly. Every coach has the problem of motivating his team each week and every coach probably does it differently, but clearly Price is failing to get his players 'up' for some matches.

Two problems which I think indicate problems with Price as the coach. Both long standing rather than one-off issues.

This is a very poor second year after there was an improvement in his first year.

Let us not forget that we were very poor when he took over. I put most of the blame on the players their attitudes and focus on winning is poor nowhere near what it should be of a title winning side.

We have not one leader whose presence in the team instils a detmination to perform as they expect and accept nothing less from their team mates. We've a participation is success attitude towards finals which is small club mentality.

Our performances this year at times have been the same or worse than smiths final year which again for me reaffirms it being a player problem more than a coach.

Theres a large group of players that are not good enough and a bunch of good players whose performances have not been good enough in the ganes that count.

I still think with our near strongest team out.... it's the strongest team in SL.
Fortunately we have until late August to get it together.
There's enough to beat Hull comfortably already.

The problem I have with Price at the moment as I can't see what type of team he is building.
Other teams have a signature, we all know under Wane wigan were very aggressive and in defence and ran block for block moves. A couple of years ago Hull had a huge team similar to the Bradford team that Radford played in with Sneyd taking the role of Deacon kicking the team around the pitch.
At the start of the season our forwards were offloading for fun but we appear to have given up with that so we are not an offloading team. We don't have a particularly aggressive defence.
We have probably the best hooker in the world at jumping out of DH (possibly Cook for Rabbitohs and NSW) but we have dropped the one player in the team that is almost guaranteed to play the ball with defenders on the floor - Atkins. When BMM skittles players he then takes an eternity to play the ball and is often on an edge - surely BMM ould be better doing that in the middle to exploit the way he bends the line for Clark to run off.
We have still not learnt that whenever there is a PTB that is reasonably quick that the fullback needs to push through with Clark.
We don't appear to have looked at the strengths of the players and adapted our game to maximise their abilities.

Maybe I just can't see it and if anybody can come on here and tell me what type of team we are or where we are heading then I will happily admit I am wrong.

This is brilliant mate, i forgot how much we did offload earlier in the season until you said it. We've definately gone backwards since the beginning of the season. We look tired and look like we've loaned our skill out to another team

Speaking of loans how Harvey Livett is behind currie and hughes is frightening. That game against Leeds he was immense, attacking the line, going all out in defense, supporting players giving them options etc He should be first pick for us as he would dramatically up our skill level and energy levels. Don't get why price won't pick him unless he thinks Currie and Hughes cost too much to drop?

I'm with you, this year has completely baffled me.