Cas are a very good side who are well coached, McShane, Gale Roberts and Dorn are an excellent fast creative set of players in key positions. They will be a match for anyone. If you put excellent players in key positions then you just need grafters around them. They did their homework and got on the outside shoulder of the very slow Finn and mentally slow Miller and simply ran round us.

England tried hard and looked the part, Bill Toupou had a good game, BBJ did his best and Howarth was excellent. I also thought Gibson defended well. For 20 minutes without doing anything great we looked OK , we were pretty good in defence, we did not offer anything in attack but we never will while ever Finn and Miller play. The pass from Miller to Gibson that allowed Webster to put Gibson into touch, the dropped ball first tackle from Walton and Finns lack of speed and bottle to drop on a loose ball all took place 10 minutes before half time so instead of going in at 6 all we went in at 18 6 and the game effectively lost.

We were very poor in second half, Cas played well and Gale and Dorn toyed with us running at Finn.

Think there must be another Anthony Toupou in Aus because the one we have is a tourist on his hols and can never have played for Aus, we lack aggression, Kirkmond is finished, Simon and Anakin need to play.

How we miss Tim Smith the RL player, not the man but the player. Finn and Miller need to be dropped, we really are shoking at 6 and 7 , with the squad we have I dont know what the answer is, can BJB play at 6, with say Hall at full back ? can we loan Hampshire from Cas ? Can Sio play at 7 ?

OK let's be honest our capt needs dropping ,now

Which one, Scruton or Kirmond? FWIW both of them need dropping, surely Yates, Shulver, Molloy can't do any worse than so called seasoned professionals.

From someone who was there I would like to give a considered in depth analysis of the plusses and minuses of the game today . But I can't . We were gash .

Here's a positive
We're above Leeds in the table.
If we stay above them, we will be in the top 8

After that showing, it is hard to find any positives, but lets try.

I think England, and Bill Tupou played well, as did Stu Howarth. I think on his performances, Howarth needs to be around the 19 man squad, even when Moore and Simon is fit

Kirmo to me is finished, not only as a captain but as a player.

Miller and Finn together couldn't open a door. I think Miller would go well alongside a really good half back. Liam Finn has spent nearly his whole career in the championship, and watching him you can tell. He is out of his depth.

I have said it a few times, and we really do need a top quality half back sooner rather than later. If we don't have room on the cap, then I feel we need to offload some players, even if no one comes in, we can still terminate player contracts. I would go for one of the probable higher earners who isnt getting game time, or even the captain himself.

I am not sure yet about Anthony Tupou been here for a holiday, to me he may come into his own when the pitches dry out more, he is a David Solomona style player, and he was the same

Finn was lauded as the leader of this team most of pre season. That's why we brought him in. Has anybody seen him say two words to another player yet?

In what way can we just terminate players contracts who have no club to go to? Those contracts would still have to be paid in full, as such we would still have the same issue - no money for a decent player.

The only options are to try and offload a player or two to another club who would pay their wages instead, although i'm not sure who ould be interested in the ones we would be prepared to release. Or we take a punt on a cheap untried youngster, which is a risk in itself.

The other option is to take an out of favour player from another club who are willing to part-payhis eages to get him off the books. Travis Burns maybe springs to mind? Otherwise we are stuck with what we have got.

At 6-12 on 38 minutes I thought we'd done pretty well, considering the hammering Childs had dished us out. Then up pops Walton and gifts Cas a 6-18. We had a glimmer of a chance to recover in the dying seconds of the half but Walton again died with the ball on the last tackle. Once Cas got the 1st score of the 2nd half the game effectively died as a contest.

How about that virtual voluntary tackle on the 6th by Michael Sio when we were pressurising the Cas . Worst bit of rugby I've seen for some time.

I thought Jones-Bishop was our best player.

England was our best player by far, BJB was poor in returning the ball, and interesting listening to Luke dorn marshalling his defence, calling the shots, I have seen nothing of that from BJB, he has not lived up to the billing of his previous career thus far, but just my opinion as I saw it today,

Seem to remember about 5 years ago didnt Steve Southern have his contract terminated, this was about 8 games into i think a 3 year deal. There was also the time when as a cost cutting exercise, the club terminated contracts of players over a certain age.

Maybe if we hadn't have given contracts to average three quarters, in Arundel, Gibson, Tupou and Walton, then maybe we would have had the finance to bring in another half back.

Probably irrelevant now, but we should have sold Kirmo on in 2013, when he had a decent price tag on him, rather than offload the players we did, every one of the players offloaded in 2013 are far better than what we have now

Isn't hindsight a wonderful thing.

Back when we were selling our best players to stay alive, Kirmond was "not for sale" and every other "decent" player went over a 4-6 week period.

Where we are now and with Kirmond's injuries and lack of form, it would have been a good move but, at the time, the club did the right thing.

The following season all of the players sold became injured at pretty much the same time so it turned out to be a shrewd bit of business.

Having said that we look desperately short of game breakers.

Smith, Lauititi and McShane gone, we just don't seem to have much in the locker, although it's hard to create anything if you are not going forward.

Positives

Howarth gave everything.
BJB didn't look bad.
England had a decent game.
Widnes hammered Leeds by more than they beat us!

Negatives

Scrotum doesn't appear to have the guts for it.
Kirkmond is a shadow of the version we had on loan and for 12-18 months after he signed.
Nowhere near enough urgency in defence, can't give genuinely quality pivots like Cas have time to do what they want.
Lyne and Gibson seemed to part like the red sea a couple of times for no apparent reason.
Finn's kicking was woeful (compare to that of Gale and the precision of the bombs).
Cats looked and extremely good side and will beat much better sides than us.

Southern agreed a pay off, although whether he ever actually received it is a moot point thanks to Elston. The other instance you quote is when we went belly up and ended up in a cva so unless we want to go down route its a no go. Fact is our recruitment has left us using too much cap up on too many average squad players and we have very little room for manoeuvre.

It is frustrating.

We probably have about £125k-£150k worth of salary sitting in the stands week in week out not getting the game time.

That money would go a long way towards a very good half back

Do the club actually have a chief exec these days. I know Kath replaced Elston, but she has gone, and I havent ever heard her been replaced

To be fair, we handled Cas pretty well for 30 - 35 mins, but did a lot of defending in the process. My issue is that we were just so dominated in the middle, our backs had no where to go.

The defence lurched between good and horrendous, at least 3 of their tries came from busting through 3,4 or 5 attempted tackles - not good enough in SL.

Having said that, I thought we were unfortunate again at certain times in the first half, that bizarre shoulder charge call, Finn not quite being able to get to the loose ball which let them go over in the corner.

I think we can play a lot better as a group but need to start gelling fast and as that comes on, speed up the attack.

Positives, well we’ve got HKR next week, with the numbers they have out, we won’t have a better chance than in a long time. Then the next home game against the French could go either way.

Negatives, the game in-between those two.

We're not in the World Club Challenge are we?

Agree with that and add England to our best player. We have currently players playing no where near what they're capable of. Kirmond, Scruton and Finn although not the only ones, they're a a pale imitation of themselves these first 2 games.

In Kirmond's case, unfortunately it looks like injuries have caught up with him and he's just not capable physically of performing like he did a couple of years ago. There's no way he can Captain imo when he seems to be struggling so much with his own game, it's no benefit to either side. As for Finn we know what he did at Cas, we knew he wasn't a flash player but for them he did the little things right and guided them around the park. Atm there's non of that on show and the pairing of Finn and Miller look like they've just met each other for the first time before the game.

Some how we've got to find some domination and aggression in the forwards, Simon we'll add a bit of that but we need a lot more and we need to try some new faces, maybe try Annakin, Walker and Molloy and give Hal a crack at SO, it can't hurt and may give the other players a kick up the . Without our forwards setting a platform our backs will continue to look crap. Add to that if we don't find a win or two, players confidence is going to continue to fall and then we'll really be screwed.

When we played Leeds at boxing day, yes it was a friendly but still I actually thought our defense looked pretty good, came up quick as a line and they worked well with each other and hardly missed a tackle. What's happened since then, sloppy tackles, poor reads and a real lack of dominating as a group in the tackles and slowing the PTB down.

I always thought it'd take time to gel as a side, with a fair number of new faces but it's so frustrating when they're making silly mistakes and some players are just not performing.

Not how I saw it. Finn could have easily dived on that ball but instead he just stood by and watched the Cas player pick it up. I thought we could easily have been going in 6 all at half time. Instead we gift them two tries and the game was pretty much gone by the time they'd scored straight after half time.

Right, I thought England and bill tupou went well. How arthritis was ok but his passing from dummy half can be painfully slow at times and if he sped it up he could be a good hooked.

I thought that we did ok in the first half but again made too many mistakes and cas made us pay which was the difference. As for the 2nd half we were awful. Not only was our tackling at time attrotious but we never looked like scoring.

I don't like to bag individual players but I am afraid from what I have seen from him so far he is not good enough. He is just too slow and his kicking and passing game is below standard.

Finally I would just like to say that even though we let in 7 try I thought our left hand side defence was good. Cas didn't get through on that side once so I think we have to credit arundal and bill tupou for that.

If Kirmon, Scruton and other forwards are injured or completely off form then replace them with Molloy, Simon, Yates and Walker for the Hull KR game...

Thought Walton had been playing centre in pre season? Surprised that he was ahead of Molloy or Yates for interchange second row yesterday.

Don't see how we will win at Hull KR tbh. Injuries or not they'll be targeting us as well be targeting them - and our performances there recently have been diabolical. Their halfbacks (even withou Campese) are infinitely superior to ours.

I think looking at all the posts we seem to agree that on paper we look not bad a side and can compete, but at least 4-5 are nowhere near the quality levels of previous years, and that's what's killing us, we all need to be at the races week in week out as we haven't got world class match winners, too many players have gone missing and arnt giving the goods, we can just afford 1-2 at most but anything above that then however we have prepared for the game is out the window,,
I'm giving it another few weeks, before commiting to the doom, however Warrington away in few weeks will be a marker to any improvement as that was a horror show last year,,

Again another baffling decision from a coach that is held in high regard. Walton should be centre or not in the squad. Other options are better at second row i.e. molloy and centre is one of our weakest positions!