What new coaching staff? I’m pretty sure Covid has reduced funds as it is, never mind paying off Chester and how many coaches. It’s just not feasible to sack Chester at this point.

If Chester leaves this year, it’ll be his choice. We’ve got a nothing season ahead of us now, I’d like to see us be more enterprising in attack like we were yesterday.

I still can't get over the Pitts brainfart and wonder how things would have progressed.

Disagreed. At 20-12 we started to get a roll on, we should’ve had a penalty for a high tackle but the ref gave it to Catalans for Pitts rushing in. When has that ever happened in the past few years? I don’t disagree with the sin binning but the awarding of the penalty was wrong and essentially put the game to bed.

I don't think you do yourselves any favours by blaming the ref for being the difference. Wakey were much improved from the heavy defeat the week before, so i would take that, and work on this performance. If you want to say the ref had a poor game, then fine, i respect your opinion.

I’m not blaming the ref for us losing, Catalans taking advantage of our right edge with some smart play did the damage in the end. But giving Catalans the penalty on our try line killed the game - there’s no two ways about it.

Wollo will Pitts take over from Grix for the next couple of seasons

With our defending style how many players this season have scored hat tricks against us?

Chester has made some poor signings of average players rather than one or two classier players we should have got when we had those two top 5 finishes and a little bit extra to spend we desperately need a scrum half organiser and they dont come cheap i know in the past we have had luck and got decent output from average signings but when you see other teams getting better players and we dont it does annoy

People keep bleating on about a scrum half and an organiser, well we’ve just had one and he did nothing. Brough as has had a great career and he did nothing at Wakefield partly because his legs had gone and we couldn’t get him close enough to put his little kicks through. When drinkwater was at Leigh they got relegated when he was at hull kr they stopped up on the last day, but when he was at Catalan the first time he was great and the pack rolled teams over on the way to Wembley. Him and moloney never run with the ball they are both short of pace but they don’t have to run because the pack is so dominant it’s front foot rugby nearly all the time. Add to that their strength, hunger and fitness and they look great. Our pack is too old and slow for fast rugby. Unless we at least get parity with the opposition pack we’ve no chance. Where’s king and green. We need a more or less complete new pack of forwards who are prepared to roll their sleeves up and do some damn graft who are prepared to get fit and run hard and take their opponents on.

Agreed you could put the best half in the world into our squad but unless the forwards lay a platform it’s never going to work. As I said elsewhere though if Catalans are turning us round with early kicks and the backs aren’t making any kind of metres the forwards aren’t going to be as dominant. I think people underestimate the importance of having the like of TJ, BJB and Lyne in the starting 13.

Agreed you could put the best half in the world into our squad but unless the forwards lay a platform it’s never going to work. As I said elsewhere though if Catalans are turning us round with early kicks and the backs aren’t making any kind of metres the forwards aren’t going to be as dominant. I think people underestimate the importance of having the like of TJ, BJB and Lyne in the starting 13.

No way. I really like Pitts and was pleased he came back. The incident just absolutely gutted me and was so unprofessional and subsequently cost us a possible come back. Full support and fresh start next game. Ditto any member of the current squad.

Grix was a long sad story and far more than his nadir v Saints. I am expecting him in the adoption fundraiser by the way

We all know that it must be Chester’s decision to quit because no one will force him. We just have to hope he realises that by staying he is causing more damage but he didn’t at Hull KR so I am not optimistic.

Agree we need a better pack but everything catalans did in first half went through maloney there is a reason these players get paid the big bucks and unless we can homegrow a josh papali we need a dominant voice getting our forwards more mobile thats where your coaching and advisors come in rather than the five drives and a kick we put out at the minute often minus the kick cos weve knocked on etc

The ref didn't score the try. Decision may have been wrong, from our point of view, but we then needed to defend for 6 tackles. Which we couldn't manage to do as we can't defend full stop.

I agree PT.
However, Chester was the coach last week as well ??
Yesterday was a huge improvement on last week, no doubt about it.

My comment on Powell improving players and Chester, less so, was a general comment for comparison.
As for which is the better coach of these 2 - there isn't any discussion neccessary, although some credit at Cas obviously goes to Powell's coaching team.

With Trinity last season and this, our squad looks better on paper than our results and although there have been injuries etc, just look what Cas did when they had the mother of all injury crisis' a couple of seasons age.
I seem to recall one of their props playing in the halves for a couple of games.
Their whole attacking set up is streets ahead of ours and defensively they are better too - with or without injuries.

Interesting that Cas and Powell are brought into it, because correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t the very same Catalans team hand out a drubbing to Powell’s Cas side a few weeks ago? 14-0 down and going on to score 40 unanswered points...think Cas’s backline that day was a fair bit stronger than what we had out...


Can’t we just accept we gave it a good shot...plenty of effort which we all ask and we’re just beaten on the day by a better team...and do all that without blaming the coach for once?

I strongly believe that if the coach was anyone other than Chris Chester he would have been down the road by now. I know it's an old cliche but if i had a success rate of only 25% in my job of work I wouldn't have lasted very long. MC's closeness to CC must be a factor in him lasting so long at the Club. Two previous incumbents of the role, Agar and Webster weren't shown quite so much leeway from the chairman during their somewhat disastrous tenure. Much as I like CC I think he has overstayed his welcome.

Genuine question...

Take the last 10 super league games of last season and the first 7 of this...

5 wins from those 17...which of the 12 we lost should we have won, in your opinion?

I think what you saw from Pitts was born out of frustration that his fellow forwards had allowed Mcllorum amongst others cheap shot our players throughout the 2 games and nobody stood up to him. In my opinion the blame lies with the pack for not standing up for themselves last weekend. An example of this is Mcllorum twisting Fifita's ankle to try an aggrevate his injury on at least 2 occasions. Dave shouldnt be allowing that to happen and should be getting stuck into him for it. Or playing clever and highlighting it to the officals by staying down.

I think Pitts showed something which ive wanted to see since the back end of last year. Some desire and fight, i wish all the forwards showed the same. He'd be my captain from this point forward to be honest.

I’ll even post the 12 losses to help you out...

Last season...

Warrington (a)
Wigan (h)
Hull (h)
St Helens (a)
Wigan (a)
Cas (h)
Catalans (a)

This season...

Hull KR (a)
Cas (a)
Hull (h)
Wigan (n)
Catalans (n)

Which of those should we have won in your eyes? Maybe a couple?

On the flip side our 5 wins were...

Last season...

London (h)
Hull KR (a)
Huddersfield (h)

This season...

Salford (a)
Warrington (h)

Maybe a couple unexpected there to balance it a bit?

Notice I’ve only included the last 10 games of last season because the period before that we were absolutely crippled with injuries, I also aren’t counting the first 10 games when we had a fully fit squad and won 6 of those and lost by a single score to both Saints and Warrington to be sat 4th after 10 rounds before the injuries struck.

Another thing to note is we were playing some great stuff scoring 30 points or more on 5 occasions...in big wins at both Hull and Leeds and in wins over eventual grand finalists Salford and previous grand final winners Wigan...and guess what...the most astonishing thing about that is we haven’t done owt since Kear left!

Dear oh dear seems to me some of the Chester bashers must never have played the game or even trained for it. The Catalans pack is probably one of the top two packs in super league and not many teams will handle them plus they have very classy players all over the park and could probably coach themselves. If i had a choice between Chester and Macnamara I would take Chester every time. As for Powell I thought we were better against Catalans yesterday than Castleford were 2 weeks ago by a long way.The players we had available yesterday gave it their best shot but 2 or 3 silly mistakes and a couple of dubious calls from monsieur Kendall led to us coming up a bit short. Keep the faith.

I spoke to Jordan about the Pitts incident when he got home due to the fact he was in the middle of it and as big as he is he’s still my lad and I want to protect him but he said he heard Jay mentioned and went in to help him, I wish that he could have landed one on the grub. In all the time I’ve watched him play since 6 years old it’s the first time I’ve witnessed him do it, not the gentleman thing to do but chuffed that he did I know I would have done it.

Spot on Teltry, some sense at last

Don't quite see what you're getting at but certainly the "golden point" Hull game, the Leeds (home) and Hull KR (home) games last season plus all the London Bronco debacles.

With the squad that we have I would have thought that at least a 60% success rate.