Have you put Wire 7th just to provoke a reaction, if so it's boring.

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'd agree with you if any of the main contenders strengthened in an major way.

Leeds have Briscoe but they already had a strong back line
Wigan look weaker
Saints have a half back so they'll improve on last year
Salford have improved but to go from whipping boys to title contenders in one season, can't see it plus how many of Salfords players would a genuine top 5 side want in their side, 3 possibly 4. That doesn't make a team.
Hudds look the same but with a years valued knowledge.

We look weaker but not severely and with a couple of surprise elements (granted potentially negatively) we could really kick on.

I've got a £100 of my money against £50 of yours that says Warrington will still be in the play offs after the first week.

Presume a realist like yourself will be happy to accept the bet as you're not making such statements just for effect and to be controversial?

Hudds to win the LLS again for me, Wigan 2nd. Either 3rd or 4th for us depending
on whether Leeds take February to August seriously or not.

1 Hudds
2 Wigan
3 Wire
4 Leeds
5 Saints
6 Hull
7 Catalan
8 Salford
9 Hull KR
10 Castleford
11 Widnes
12 Bradford
13 Wakefield
14 London

I think we're a fair bit weaker this year - Hodgson is a massive loss. Briers is a big loss. Losing Morley and Carvell is a blow.
A lot relies on Higham because I can't see Monas playing so much in all honesty.
It'll take some time for us to become a cohesive unit with those changes. (alhough I have been wrong on more than one occassion!)

1 Hudds
2 Leeds
3 Wigan
4 Wire
5 Saints
6 Catalan
7 Hull
8 Salford
9 Hull KR
10 Widnes
11 Cas
12 Bradford
13 Wakefield
14 London

CC - Wire
GF - Leeds

Now 6 days later I reckon Saints will finish higher then 5th looking at the Makison interview........

Is this a wind-up? Briers has spent a fair amount of time on the sidelines in the last couple of seasons and our win record when he hasn't played has been excellent. We don't rely on him like we did in the past.

Our style of play will be modified to suit the personnel and Russel may not have the handling and vision of Hodgson but he is a devastating runner in broken field.

We have a younger and hopefully fitter squad and I don't expect anything less than than last year and possibly even more with a trophy back in the cabinet.

I think you might be disappointed mate.

The loss of Briers will be felt in the big games where Warrington's lack of invention at half back will be exposed.
Don't get me wrong, Myler and Ratchford are both excellent players, but neither has a stunning tactical kicking game, or does that off the cuff bit of magic, that Briers could change a game with.
I really rate O'Brien and would like to see him get game time, but I am not sure if this will happen without injuries.

The loss of 3 starting props will also be felt, as Wires get out of jail card last season was the interchange, which blew teams away.

They will still be to strong for the weaker teams, and I really rate some of the young players, especially Brad Dwyer, but I think next season will be one of transition.

Briers had such an influence on the team that Myler and Ratchford didn't/ couldn't step up their organisational game. I can't recall last season when Briers had a big impact in changing a game so I am still hopeful that the enforced change may work out positively.

We also have three props to step up in Riley, England and Asotasi.

How do you lose three starting props? Especially when we have retained Hill.

I don't think that's true. In theory, having 8,9,10 off the bench was good and the thought of Morley, Carvell and Monas coming on sounds terrifying, but it often saw us slacken off last year. Only when Hill, in particular, came back on did we tighten back up in defence.

Starting props next year will surely be Hill and Woody with Asotasi coming off the bench in the Moz mould and England and Riley fighting it out for the Carvell role. Riley and England both have the size of Carvs so we shall see if they can step up. Asotasi should provide us with more availability than Moz and hopefully some of his leadership qualities.

I suppose the only question mark will be if Smith wants Asotasi to start?

You've never called it as it is. You make ridiculous statements and then shout others down when they have a different opinion to you. Briers, Hodgson and Morley all missed a lot of games last year and we didn't exactly do badly without them. This will be a season of transition, but we'll still make the top 3-4.

I don't think that I said that very well.
I view the prop/hooker interchange as the starting line up nowadays, as very few play 80 minutes.
The personnel changes for Wire will defiantly mean this is a season of tradition, and it is all just opinion at this point as to how that will pan out.
No one knows if the changes will make the team stronger or weaker, they can't.
But thats why we go on forums, to air our views, and argue the toss with fellow internet know alls.
Happy New Year to you all!

Last paragraph well put.

wasting your time with that mate..he strikes me as all mouth and no trousers...words are easy backing up those words are totally different

I personally think that the four first choice props will be:

Hill
Wood
Asotasi
Harrison

Possible but GRiley and England are both out and out props and are both big units so it is up to them to impress now in pre-season.

well, there's an incentive there for england and Riley, harrison is now on the back foot(looking at it, i don't think he was at all fit last season, or for the last 18 months) so there's a gap there in the rotation, also depends if we're going with a prop at 13 still.

Also, Ben Evans, he had somethingof a mixed game on Sunday, aside from a few iffy offloads, he certainly looks like he doesn't want farming out to london for the year.

Heard that Ben Evans will be staying with us for this season. May be to protect him from the uncertainty surrounding Bradford or perhaps TS believes we need some additional forward numbers.

Ben Currie looks like he'll end up ar 13, ball playing loose like Scully or O'loughlin in the long term.

he was trying to throw out a few a scully/lockers style passes on sunday, something i've not seen from him previously.

He was a half back at junior level

Leeds
Wire
Wigan
Saints
Hudds
Salford
Catalan
Hull
Castleford
Widnes
Hull kr
Bradford
Wakefield
London

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.