In a season like this there will be disruptions and loss of players due to covid unavailability / lack of match fitness catching up with them so I'm less bothered about what it looks like, it's more about hanging in there and picking up wins.

The harsh truth which was apparent even before the season is, despite the overblown bluff that KF puts out and some fans fall for, we are not a well balanced squad that looks like a SL winning squad. There are too many positions where we have question marks and too many players who are biggish names, and who fans think are better than their performances justify.

But last year these problems were here too and we scrapped our way over the line in the Challenge Cup and beat Saints at Wembley. My main hope for us is that we can scrap enough wins to make it to the playoffs and then this year, given all the random luck that will affect this season, it is more likely to be true that "once you get to the playoffs, anything can happen", whereas usually its "once you get to the playoffs, only one of Leeds, Saints or Wigan will be left standing at the end."

The problem Price has, is that his style of RL leaves absolutely no room for any excuses or sympathy for him if we end up trophyless.

If he does manage a trophy then fans will grit their teeth and accept the awful rugby as being a necessary evil. However, if he doesn't then he has absolutely nothing to fall back on and would be rightfully prone to the axe.

Personally, I think the writing was on the wall throughout the last half of last season,but , as usual, our board always appear to be the last to see what most people can see and is the reason why we are always behind the 8 ball.

Above 2 posts are spot on, I think to many people have been brainwashed into thinking all is rosey, feel free to knock me down on this but I don’t Kare.

Price said in his post match interview on Sky that he wanted the team to 'play more footy' and seemed pretty unhappy with our display... Seems he WANTS us to be better with our attack and we simply aren't pulling it off.

There's talking a good game and then there's playing a good game??....

Thanks Mr Barrowclough, I'll try and remember to avoid watching the Wire when I finish this stretch. Don'tr forget to shut the door on your way out.

I agree. The move that HKR scored against us at the start of the game was a cracker. The timing was great.
It is not as if you need lots of different moves. Castleford (few years back) used to use the same few moves with Luke Gale pulling the strings on the left of the field ... and scored loads of tries.
It's all pretty simple. You do wonder a bit what exactly we do in training.

You only have to compare how Charley played when he first came to us to now. Very few gaps created for the wingers to exploit. Other than ploughing down the middle I have no idea what our system is meant to be. The closer we get to the try line the less likely we are to score. It is as boring as hell.

The half backs have taken some stick BUT
Widdop: 1st Try His Kick through 2nd Try Class Finish off left foot 3rd Try Involved until got flattenned
Austin: That was a belter of a drop goal from a long way out to win game.
So pretty effective really.

The left edge Widdop/Currie/King/Lineham ... looking good.
But how our right edge with Austin & BMM isn't looking dangerous is beyond me.

Defensively i think we've massively Improved under price, but he's added nothing to our attack and we've gotten worse since July last year. I'd be happy for Price to keep doing what he's doing defensively but we should bring in a full time attacking coach.
The Railwayman said it perfectly, i haven't seen any set attacking plays in a long time. We seem to score off lucky breaks and lucky bounces rather than plays we have in the book to break a teams defence.
It's weird that we're playing really boring crap rugby yet we keep making finals and won the challenge cup last year. It's utterly bizzarre.

I'd rather win than be like Castleford, who as the commentator stated "played magnificently", and lost by 10 points to nil.
How can a team play magnificently and lose without scoring a point? Fortunately, I only tuned in and watched the last 20 minutes, and won't lose any sleep over missing two penalty goals.

C'est magnifique mais c'est pas rugby league ?

Mangetout, Winslade, Mangetout.

That's spot on. He's wasted in he current set up.
It's not his fault.

The sign of a good coach - in my humble opinion - is if a coach can make the team look better that its' individual players.

Powell does it, Watson does it.

We can certainly get up for some games with some good tactics (eg Hull and Saints in the CC) - but on the whole we're stale in attack which is criminal given the players we have.

War and Peas by Leo Tolstoy ?

There was certainly a lot of disappointing errors and sheer stupidity in Blake Austin's case, but as pointed out earlier in the thread we have won a couple of games and picked up the points. There was also some cause for satisfaction. I thought Widdop played a really good game and even nearly managed to strip the ball when Huddersfield scored their try. Nobody mentioned Toby King but I thought he also played well. It was his break and ability to get the ball away that saw the flying pig score and he played a nice interchange of passes with Widdop for his try. Yes, he doesn't have electrifying pace or score lots of tries to catch the eye, but he has excellent hands, is very good in the air, and his defensive game has really come on. But his main role is to feed the winger and provide linking play which I think he does really well. Chris Hill I thought also worked really hard and seems to have finally got rid of those silly penalties he used to give away.

Team balance is certainly a problem with Austin looking the odd man out. He is a shadow of the player we saw when he first joined and doesn't seem capable of providing those openings for players around him. Compare that with Widdop's pass to put Currie in space during the HKR game, then his kick through for Currie to score against Hudds. Austin needs to provide hose sorts of opportunities on his side of the field.

The one big benefit of these wins is also team morale. I think we were short on that during SL Part One, but despite the silly mistakes, the body language we are currently seeing looks pretty positive.

Lots of stuff needs fixing and no, we are not going to see the quality of play that entertained us back in 2012, but if we can see steady improvement we have a good chance of 4th place methinks, After that it's knockout rugby and anything can happen.

I Don't mention Toby King anymore for kind of the same reason i don't mention Daz Clark anymore. Because they always have a good game, and i just kind of expect it now. I wasn't really keen on King the first year or 2 but i think he's Brilliant now and can only get better.
I 100% agree with you Winslade about him and a year learning off Greg Inglis can only improve him.
My main worry now is the team seems stifled and the creativity seemed to have disappeared for a while, but i've started to see glimpses of it coming back so hope it continues to grow and improve. Or Inglis will come over and play in a dull as hell team that he can't do anything with.
Austin looks like he doesn't want to be here anymore, his attitude seemed to change when he got injured and missed the CC final. After that he just seems to have lost the spark and energy he used to have. He does have a habit of starting off great at a new team and fading away but i hope it's just a case of consistancy building the team up again.
The team we have on paper is excellent so i hope we find our form again soon as it's been a long time since i've been excited before one of our games.

Austin is doing a convincing impersonation of Tyrone Roberts, both in application and an aura of sulkiness, and has been for some time.

There's more chance of my being kidnapped by aliens from a planet entirely populated by Nigella Lawson lookalikes but he needs to be dropped to the bench and replaced with Stef, who I think would dovetail with Widdop nicely.

It'd never happen as you say but Austin being dropped to the bench could be a good thing. Last decent game he played for Canberra was when he came on with 15 to go and got MOM. Releasing Austin for the last twenty under the current rules could be a masterstroke...but it would take an innovative coach to give that a go. Also can we use this season to give some of the youngsters - Doro, Robson, Dean a bit of a sniff at some point?

Maybe we need to reconsider our view of the match bearing in mind the Saints and Wigan matches this weekend.

What is there to reconsider?... We are awful to watch and look to have zero attacking plans and it's been that way for over half a season now - I'm not sure how Saints and Wigan perform as much to do with that?

Well ,we are in a truncated season, there is every chance our GF hopes will go the way of every other year & we have some senior players getting a bit long in the tooth.
There is no relegation ,so why not blood some of our young lads. Have some faith, give 'em a go.

With covid bouncing around and the fixture pile up at the end of the season I am pretty sure there will be a lot of young players playing SL games this season.

Well Simon Woolford has received an apology from the RFL Ref department. They have said Masila should have been sent off and one of your tries should have been ruled out for a forward pass.

I suppose an apology is sufficient for costing us the 2 points, eh?