word for word, this is what i thought before last season, and begrudgingly they did bloody well. AS you say though, it catches up, eventually.

Didn't go yesterday but reading this thread it looks like a Widnes re-run.
Poor handling maybe due to different combinsations every week. Poor and cold weather might be to blame. That can come right and we did score some very good tries with excellent handling.

Where there is no excuse are the numerous penalties. Hand in at the ptb, lying on, being sucked in to a push and shove situation, away from home it's an easy penalty for the ref to give to get the home fans off his back. Chester's remarks that he told them to "get into Wigan's faces and pressure the ref" is that getting Wigan to retaliate was his game plan. Trouble is from reading all this that it succeeded and we fell for it big time!
One remedy is for the management/coaching staff to financially fine players who concede penalties. Our pen count against would drop like a stone. Was done some years ago I think by Leeds and had the required effect.
Noticable in the Saints/Souths game that when there was the possibility of a bit of push and shove the Souths players turned their backs and walked away. They also walked away with the trophy! Not easy I'm sure but that (a low pen count) can be the difference between winning and not.
In one sense we are ahead of where we were last year. After those same three opponents 2014 we had one League point now we've three.
We have a massively talented squad with plenty players to return and 27 games to go.
Sort this problem out now and it will be a very successful season.

That has to be an error. Embarrassing if it's not. Ditto Larne Patrick - and he only made 13 tackles. Both need dropping.

No charge thank God, insufficient evidence.

Granted you scored in the 1st minute of the 2nd half but if you wasn't at the game you wouldn't know the conditions that both teams played in. In the 1st half Rovers where kicking into a very heavy wind. We went in 14-6 down which was a testament to how hard Rovers worked in that 1st half in the face of some extreme weather.

In the 2nd half Wigan had to kick into the awful wind and on leaving the ground listening to the radio the commentator apparently predicted that the wind was a 12point advantage for the side playing behind it, That is effectively what happened. Rovers simply played better with the wind in the 1st half and if it wasnt for that 5 minute collapse in between halves where your team scored 3 tries then the score would have been much more convincing.

Defensively Wigan where quite solid as Rovers forced many GLDO's during that 2nd half.

Also talking about wigans poor game management how about when the game was 6-0 to us we got a penalty 20 out infront of the sticks turn the chance for 2 points down knock the ball on on 3rd tackle Wigan come up our end score and then get on a bit of a role so maybe poor game management from us let you into the game?

At the time with the conditions been against us I thought we made the correct decision not go for goal. Guess the team didn't account for a possible early knock on.

Trouble is wigan are to easy to wind up, get them scrapping and the penalties come and then the points which is when losses mount up, discipline is the main issue you need to address.

Agreed

THat's true, and credit to Rovers for their tactics, but we simply should have adapted to the conditions better than we did - Smith's bomb into the wind when an easy dink into the in-goal area was a much better option; risky passes that ended up being dropped; those sort of things are OK when you need to gamble, but with a big lead safety-first, high-percentage rugby is called for.

Smiths bomb was embarrassing. All his chasers to his right were outnumbering HKR and he floats a bomb up in to open space in the middle with not a Wigan player in sight.

Smith will come good but he's took so many wrong options this year.

I've just watched the 15 minutes highlights on Wigan t.v.

No way did Campese play the ball correctly for the last try, and the pass from Mossop to Patrick, which would have put Wigan 4 scores clear looks flat at worst, certainly doesn't look forward.

However it doesn't alter the fact that indiscipline and dropped ball cost us the game.

So have I and although Campese is looking like a great signing for the Robins, this was definitely a game we should have won.

I posted after the Widnes game that we have several problems that need to be addressed and after witnessing the Hull KR debacle I'm afraid to say that if we don't improve soon we'll be in for a very long and frustrating season. Hull KR deserved their win and fair play to them, but they are NOT a good team by any stretch of the imagination and neither are 12 men from Widnes. These should be routine victories before the really tough games.

The latest performance away from home is becoming the norm. The performances at Hull KR (twice), Widnes (twice), Bradford and Wakefield stretching back to last summer have been woeful. I can't remember the last decent away game performance (possibly Hull last May).

The discipline is shocking. Teams know to wind us up and we fall for it. It needed a leader and cool head out there on Sunday to calm it down and stick to our structure. McIlorum is not that man. He is never a captain. He needs to concentrate on his own game at the moment, because he is offering nothing. I lost count of the number of tackles he missed.

First the good points; Hampshire actually did well and should now get a decent run in the team. Lee Mossop was the best forward for me. Our only dominant part of the game coincided with Lee being on the pitch.

Now the bad.
Burgess at fault for a try again. Needs to be dropped.
Sutton, Tautai were poor. Clubb after his exertions against Brisbane was quiet. Patrick is bang average. I Fail to see how we got the best of this deal with Giants.
Logan should have been on the bench
Joel needs to be in the pack. Gelling keeps dropping the ball and offers Josh nothing. Look over the park and see Goulding offer at least two tries on a plate to his winger. Gelling may offer yards in defence but at this rate he will starve Josh to death.
Williams and Smith offered nothing. I watched Dureau and Carney on Saturday, what a contrast, Wigan have failed to replace Green and it will come back to haunt them IMO.

I'm going to Cas on Friday expecting a defeat. Cas were unlucky at Saints on Friday and will be hurting. We never play well there anyway. The next away game after that is Leeds and our away form is worse than Catalans over the end of last season and the beginning of this. So getting in the top 4 above Saints, Leeds, Wire and Catalans is going to be a struggle.

Its worth noting that, although inconsistent, HKR do beat people. They[ve beaten Saints an number of times over the past few years.

They should have beat Leeds in the opening game, two really bad calls went against them.

And they also lost to Wakefield.

At this stage of the season you get a few rogue (if you'll excuse me) results but it's the standard of rugby that bothers me most. The lack of creativity, the poor discipline, the lack of props making hard yards, and all of a sudden we are losing tight games through giving away soft penalties.

[urlhttp://www.wigantoday.net/sport/wigan-warriors/wane-wants-warriors-to-clean-up-their-act-1-7135382[/url

“I don’t want us to be less aggressive – we just need to be a bit smarter.”


Yep.

Too true.

Aggressive running, aggressive tackling and aggressive kick chases but none of the push and shove matches, the patting people on the head when they make mistakes, the kicking out at people, the (slightly) late tackles on kickers giving people the opportunity to go down like Jurgan Klinsmann etc.

We play hard and tough but then spoil it with childish petulance.

It needs to stop as of Friday.

Yep, exactly. I know people keep going on about Souths, but the thing that impressed me the most about them was that they did all of the aggressive tackling, kick chases and running but then walked away from any push and shoves (like we used to!). Early days yet, but if we learn that not many teams will stop us. In the games we've lost this year, the fact that we were still in the games with the amount of penalties and dropped balls shows that.

I said after that Souths performance that I would have our lads watching that video day in day out. Don't watch and analyse our play, watch that and see how simple the game can be made to look. We used to be aggressive but controlled and now we look like an amateur club side having a Saturday afternoon scrap.

Why get involved in it all with 16 and 14 point leads respectively at Widnes and HKR? Smile at them and point at the scoreboard or just walk away and legally bash them the next time you're given the opportunity.

We can't clone a Greg Inglis or the Burgess twins but we can't take a leaf out of their book of discipline, self control and composure.

If we can see it, Wane surely must know. It speaks volumes speaking to a current SL player (who has yet to play Wigan this year), he informed me the plan will be to get under Wigan's skin! I've read the article on the club website about the players perfroming 50 push ups if they knock on, I think they may need to add some for conceding a penalty, which they seem to have forgotten about!

Gelling must have done about three million press ups this season! With Joe Burgess gaining quickly on him.

I'd like to think Wane is clever enough to have privately bashed them for their discipline at the weekend because he certainly didn't do it in public.

I would be very surprised, and disappointed if that hadn't happened.

It must have.

I read he'd turned up late for the press conference as he was speaking at length to the players so fingers crossed.

There's a lot of talk about errors but they're a product of the discipline IMO. We're becoming fatigued because we're constantly at our end and when we do get the ball the games that heated teams are hunting in packs and the refs are struggling that much to keep control, ball steals and interference aren't really being looked at.