Padders got a lot of abuse for this post:
Quote ="PADDERS"Prepare to eat your words Salford massive improvement Wire the total opposite imho without P&B tinted glasses on our mediocre and tactically inept half back pairing will be our achilles heel we don't have a leader who can drag a team around the pitch we will miss hodgesons link up play in attack .
we needed a massive replacement for Briers n got mmmmm nobody biiiggg mistake imo we needed Cooper Cronk or someone of the same calibre not doing this will imo cost us dearly I doubt we will go further than first round of play offs and can forget the challenge cup
I'm a realist u lot can bury ur heads in the P&B sand if u want I just call it as it is !'"
I still agree with mine:
Quote ="sally cinnamon"By April or May I predict there will be a fair few users of this forum that are posting things similar to what Padders says. The big theme of the season on this forum is going to be "we made a huge error in the off season by not strengthening the team given the players we lost". The second biggest theme will be people volunteering to pay Asotasi's air fare home.
I think by the time a third of the season has passed, we will have lost more games than we would be comfortable with, including to sides that we would usually expect to have beaten, but I also expect we will still be in touch with the top because a few of the other teams around us are going to be in similar positions. Nobody at the top is really pulling away and the top of SL is slipping down towards the middle. If Huddersfield really get things right, then this season is an advantage for them as they are the team on the up whereas the others around them are standing still or slipping backwards. Saints fans seem optimistic but they don't convince me.
The stat about our recent win rate without Briers is deceptive (believe it or not, in the last four years our record without Briers has been better than our record with him) because this season we aren't just missing Briers but Briers, Hodgson, Carvell and Morley. Had we gone in to any game last season hearing that those four were out, and the replacements were relatively untried guys like Russell and England, we would have realistic expectations about that game and if we lost to a lower table team would say well its experience for the new guys, but we need to get the big guns back for the playoffs. This season the big guns are not coming back.
The optimistic expectations all seem to be based on the perfect scenario: if Ratchford and Myler have the seasons of their lives, if England turns out to be the next Chris Hill, if Asotasi recaptures his NRL form of a few years ago, if Russell's defence holds and he turns out to be the find of the year, if the centre inside Penny doesn't have shockers and leave him exposed all the time, then we will be ok but there are a lot of ifs.
There are other question marks in the team too: Atkins, Bridge, Michael Monaghan: are they the players they were when we were at our peak? All of them have shown signs of decline or patchy form, will this be reversed or continued? If its continued then this is another problem area for us.
I'm not panicking that we have become a rubbish team or are going to do a Bradford but my expectations are quite modest for this season: I don't expect us to win a trophy and I would be surprised if we made a final. I think it will be quite hard for our fans to accept after the good recent years and so I expect a turbulent year ahead on this forum.'"
