Quote ="TRB"Do you really wish me to answer that?
On the basis that you do: by suggesting I was wanting TS to be a tackling machine - which I don't, but at the moment he isn't connecting and the opposition are targetting his channel. As stated above, it is probably as much down to his team-mates to up their game and protect him as it is for him to step up his own.
He clearly isn't fully fit and worringly isn't talking to the players as much as he was last year either!'"
I don't know how you see all that from the North Stand Phil - I can't see any detail about who's talking to who during play, apart perhaps from Mathers shouting the odds when we're defending our try line.
I think the issue is less specifically with Tim Smith and more with the people around him; Aiton aside, we don't have anything like the required desire and brutality to make defensive wins - we don't hit hard enough, we don't drive backwards often enough and we certainly don't do the deliberately messy gang-tackling that some teams now use, which takes an age to disentangle and is, for all intents and purposes, just the newest way to push the envelope in terms of clearing the ruck.
I'm ok with Tim Smith - I'm not ok with some of his mates.
'"
