I only half agree with you. Wigan's first try was ok. There was no deliberate second movement and momentum carried him over. It was well explained by the expert referee and so you should not have any complaints about that decision.

However I do agree with you that HKR played well in defence and didn't let Wigan get on a roll. The rush defence and closing down our three quarters was good tactics and worked. This was the cause of Wigan's errors. It was disappointing that Wigan did not see what was happening a bit earlier and changed things in attack. They need to learn from this for the play-offs.

nohalfbcks (how very apt your user name is in this post).

We are still searching for a plan B, it as crying out for an half back to put through a little grubber or a little chip over the top to keep the KR defenders from rushing the Wigan outside backs.

League form pretty much means nothing at this time of the year. It doesn't mean much at any time of the year but enough results needs to come to get into a decent playoff position and title challengers will nearly always flex their muscle and go on a run at some point just to show their rivals they're around and mean business. Teams are scheming and plotting for old trafford now.

If you'd taken last years run in, in isolation, it looked like wigan were completly blowing the season.

I think wigan will definitly be at old trafford, but i'm not sure who they will be playing or wther they'll win.

I genuinely can't say who will be at Old Trafford and in all honesty it could be any of the top 6

Strange old year

The table as it would stand if you only considered matches between Saints, Wigan, Huddersfield, Leeds, Warrington and Castleford (the top 6)?

Its a Pie chart

Have hull fc played wigan or rovers yet this season ?

Yeah its been a poor season really with no stand out teams. All of the top clubs of the last few years have been very up and down and none have looked particularly great.

Conversely you could say that more clubs are stepping up & becoming more professional in their attitude. And that the days of runaway performances are in abatement - with P&R back I think we'll go back to the bad old days of routine telephone number scores and the moan will then be about the "usual suspects" at the top of the ladder: but that remains to be seen.

Whilst it might be nice to win games by simply turning up, it don't half make for a boring day/night out. I'd much rather have a season where the French nil the cabbage munchers out of the blue one minute then loose to Dr K's mercenaries the next.

Having said that, it [ihas [/ibeen an odd season & there have been some strange games. And as another thread has pointed out, I'm damned if MoS can even be identified yet.

Really? Would it be better if all the top teams were guaranteed a win whenever they took the field?

Or you could say the top clubs have all got weaker and the weaker clubs have all stayed the same and not really improved at all. A race to the bottom to make things more equal isnt a good thing either neither is top clubs not taking games seriously because the result doesnt matter and losing as a consequence. I would love a NRL style competition where anyone could beat anyone but we are far from that. Next season should be a lot better mind you with 2 less team, all teams spending up to the cap and the need to avoid relegation meaning every game counts for something.

Seriously?! So Castleford, for example, haven't improved, it's just that everybody else has weakened and come down to their level?

We now have a top 6 where anyobdy could beat anybody, and the top 10 games are far from foregone conclusions, and yet this is apparently evidence that the top teams are weakening, all the while saying you would like an NRL style competition were anybody could beat anybody.



The pessimism of RL in full swing!

Of course Cas have improved but I think his "race to the bottom" comment is worth consideration. The results may be less predictable but the quality is on the wane IMO. I watch all of the SL and NRL I can and it's like watching 2 different sports at times.

in what way?

In terms of intensity, fitness, quality NRL has probably never been farther in front of SL IMO. No doubt someone will come on soon and say there are quite a few SL clubs that could mix it in the NRL, but how do you think our team of kids would do down there? They would get slaughtered, yet are in with a real chance of carrying the comp over here.
I think another indication of domestic decline comes to mind very readily when you look back at some of the best players in recent history and compare them to today's equivalents. It's all opinions ateotd but the likes of Offiah, Davies, Sculthorpe, Faz, Long, Lyon, Robinson, etc, etc were miles better than their contemporaries - IMO, of course.

Edit: contemporaries? You know what I mean!

Seriously? How can the top clubs losing their star players year on year to the NRL and other codes not mean the competition is weakening? How can no good players coming from the NRL anymore not mean the competition here is getting weaker? The youngsters coming through are great but how is watching glorified academy matches some weeks because clubs dont even have proper squads signs of strong competition?

Yes Cas have been great and have been the best team to watch this season but so what? One swallow doesnt make a summer.

Do you seriously think Wigan are anywhere near as good as last year? We have had 7 or 8 players out on a regular basis and could still finish top. Saints are a poor team compared to teams of the last decade and they are top, Leeds are probably as bad as they have been for some time as are Warrington who arent a patch on the teams of 2 or 3 seasons ago. The other top club of the SL era, Bradford, has just been relegated. The likes of Hull FC, Hull KR, Wakefield have been as big a shambles as they have ever been. Indeed Hull FC are a big club and have seriously gone backwards since winning the Challenge Cup and getting to the Grand Final.

With your comments about the NRL and Super League I can only presume you dont watch the NRL. In the NRL teams strive for excellance and improvement each year which means that it is never predicatable and anyone can beat anyone. All, or most clubs, spend to the cap and it is a real challenge just to finish in the top 8 never mind win it. Almost every club has some star players and the salary cap is growing each year, and it dwarfs ours which also means it can target the best players from all over. The intensity, speed and fitness levels are on a different planet to SL never mind the skill levels.

Then we have with Super League, a competition where the salary cap has remained largely stagnent for over a decade and the amount of star players declines year on year. What few are left are has beens whose best years are behind them. At times this season some games have even resembled a u23 competition. Yes there is the odd upset because the top teams dont take half the matches seriously, as it is a doddle to finish in the top 8 and they dont really matter, but that is not the competition getting stronger.

Exactly!

Can't argue with anything famous says above.
Nail on head.

Yes, I watch the NRL, and it too has it's top teams and bottom teams, and the odd drubbing too. The gap may not be as wide and the overall standard is indeed better than SL, but it's by no means like watching a different sport. That's just meaningless hyperbole.

The trouble with your argument is all the contradictions. When a top NRL side loses against a bottom side it's because the competition is close. When the same happens in SL it's because the top team didn't take it seriously. It's a doddle to get into the SL top 8 yet plenty of teams make it one year and then don't the next. Of course this isn't because teams like Cas and Widnes are improving, it's because everyone else is poor. The NRL top 8 is anyone's guess, right? Yet a few teams make it EVERY year. And the fitness and intensity of the NRL isn't just better, it's "on a different planet", yet all these SL players somehow manage to go and play in the NRL. What your doing is doggedly putting a negative spin on everything SL and a positive spin on the same things in the NRL.

The NRL is better, it's not a different sport.

Surely all we have to do is look at the international game? We (as in England/GB) aren't any closer to beating Aus/NZ than we have ever been, yet the very best English players are playing in the NRL and the supply of imported talent has all but dried up.

I'm not sure that can be disputed, in which case I don't see how it can be argued that the league is better than it was previously?

I mean if you went through the team that Madge put together, then I'm not sure that many of this years crop would make that side.

It was said back in the Kevin Brown eta that too many youngsters were put into the side, and we (and indeed the youngsters) suffered as a result. Nowadays, we do that and we still challenge for every trophy.

The truly sad thing is that we often don't even get to enjoy the fruits of that work, as if the youngsters show any sign of real top drawer talent then they tend to hop it to the NRL.

We were seconds off beating NZ last year, and have beaten them many times in the past as GB

Historically we've shown we can compete in one-off games but in a series not so much. The point is though that the quality of English/British players hasn't changed a huge amount during the Super League era. The difference is that most of the best English/British players are now not playing in Super League.

You've also got a significant reduction in the number of high quality Australian and Kiwi players in the competition. Add the two together and I'd say you've probably got a whole squads worth of top drawer talent missing from Super League compared to a decade ago.

That can't be helping the overall quality of the competition can it?

As an example, if you look at the 1995 World Cup. The English and Welsh teams had 5 players in their squad that had been recruited from Union, with just 1 player from the NRL.

Of the Australian squad that year, 6 would play in Super League, 9 of the NZ would do, plus around a dozen from Samoa and the likes of Adrian Lam too.

In contrast, in the 2013 squad, we had 0 players from Union and 7 (inc Sam and Mossop) from the NRL.

None of the Australian squad have or do play in Super League. None of the Kiwi squad do, with only Lealuia having ever done so. The SL Samoan representatives was down to around 30% of the 95 tally.

Is it really improvement?

Sam was arguably the biggest recent export to the NRL, so we may well expect his departure to lower the quality of the side and SL in general, but imo Bowen has produced more in 2014 than Sam did in 2013. Even when it comes to the youngsters, they are holding their own and often exceeding expectations when they replace established stars.

Not sure how you've come to that conclusion, but Sam scored 23 SL tries and made 21 assists in 2013, so far Bowen has got 11 tries and 12 assists. Bowen has been very good for us this season but he's not in the same league attack wise as Tomkins IMO. I've no doubt he would have been the difference in the tight game, poor performances against Bradford and Hull KR.