The look on his face during the game suggests he wanted to be out there, I think it is Wane wrapping him up in cotton wool pre Wembley. Maybe he feels only a trophy will save his job (not that I agree with that).

i was reliably informed that your Sam was suspended due to imbibing too much of the hard stuff in recent days [last night?.

At the moment we look like a team with no direction, no management, the players look lost under pressure with no plan B, i fear for SW as the big match performances have been short of the mark.

I hope i'm very wrong but Hull are hitting form and we look very weak in defence and attack, if we lose the cup i feel the end for SW no matter what the play off's bring.

Yeah right.

Based on the payers on the field last night:

1) Ball control - awful. the amount of dropped ball especially early in the tackle count was shocking. Put ourselves under huge pressure allowing Hudds great field position and I think they scored most of their tries directly from these mistakes - and the missed touch pen.

2) Defence - we seem to confuse ill disciplined running out of the line with aggressive defence - same story at the Saints game. Too many players flew out of the line trying to put in a big hit, then were stepped and ended up grasping thin air or making a half tackle - we missed so many tackles this way and made it easy for Hudds to break the first tackle.

We need to get back to a good disciplined flat quick defence. We did it early in the season but seem to have forgotten about it now.

It's almost like wane has them so fired up they forget about technique and try and play on adrenaline alone.

3) Attack. Some people are saying our plays are too easy to read - what plays???? We just aren't putting on any plays at the moment. The one time we did - and there were actually two lines of dummy runners, Charnley got some space and scored a great try.

We are simply not putting on the same plays we did early in the season. At the start of the season we had so many dummy runners and options at times I couldn't see who had taken the ball. Now, we are playing a very flat ball to a forward 9 times out of 10 - and dropping it 50% of the time.......

I don't know if this is intentional in order to make our 'usual plays' harder to read, but it makes us easier to defend against - and causes more room for error - and we are making lots of errors. It may be without lockers we just don't have the 2nd/3rd receiver who can actually make these plays work?

4) Forwards - Apart from Taylor there was not a single forward who consistently broke the line. Mossop and Lauaki need to take a good hard look at themselves. Flower and Crosby need to come back asap. We are missing an experienced pack leader - not a hot headed ill disciplined ineffective forward.

Excellent post...