Tomorrow morning our players need to report in and watch the Wigan Leeds game , they need to see what effort , desire , pride in the shirt , fitness , support play , tackling , more effort is all about . Then the club needs to use some of the money they were spending on Brian Smith and pay to borrow some of the junior Wigan fitness staff , our players are not fit , that is one of the reasons we are poor in defence. MC needs to get shut of clogger , Gilmore and Duckins as they are simply useless . We need to get people in who know what they are doing .

Nothing to do with fitness.

Go on then pop tart what's it to do with them . Really hope you have your name down as a candidate for coach . Seeing as you know what the problem is

Not been fit enough or strong enough since last season at least. The players never win a collision, get dominated in attack and defence, get shrugged off too easily I could go on

Not a Wigan fan (the opposite in fact) but they were very good tonight. Way way better than last season and they've got Tomkins to come in but it does make you wonder if they are better without George Williams in the team.

We've discussed this to death but it's funny that many who moaned about fitness last year cheered how fit we were this year.

It's technique in the tackle and errors in play that mean you do more work than the opposition.

RL coaching 101

If it was fitness then how could they be 30 zip down at half-time, but yet only lose the second half 14-4? Surely the points would come in the last 20 rather than the first 20? I think it's mental rather than physical, nothing much has changed from when Webster was in charge in that respect. Defence is mostly about attitude and desire, then probably technique and fitness levels, not to mention the way a coach wants his team to defend, as in that lovely word 'structures.' The word we were told by the experts on here Brian Smith would put in place while he was here doing his stuff......

It's nothing to do with fitness for god sake give it a rest - you're actually giving them an excuse they don't deserve.

They are more than fit enough, fast enough and big enough - for whatever reason they just don't want to play for us, it's that simple.

Player for player there is nothing magical about most other SL teams, they are all beatable if the desire is there. We have put far more scratch teams out in SL through the years than this one and they have all managed to give us much more. Truth is you need great players to be the best but you just need players who give their best to be respectable. Far to many of our players lack respect for the club, some even lack self respect and that can't ever work.

PS: If they are not fit how come your new hero Tansey played well for Hudds - wouldn't be able to do that if he wasn't fit would he!

I think we are fitter than last season but are we at the level of the rest of the competition is debatable.

What ever people think of Bellys post , one thing I believe he has got spot on is, the three stooges need to go

This was from a poster on the Saints forum...

[iI don't think I've seen a super league side as unfit as Wakey was last night. They all looked fat, slow and unfit.[/i

It's not only people on here who think we look unfit, neutral fans think so too.

Oh well that swings it if the unknown Sts fan thinks so.

In the games where we've been heavily beaten, we have managed a late surge (can't think of a lower level word than surge)
If we were unfit we couldn't have done that.

You could have 13 Steve Redgraves but if he doesn't know how to play, the other team will have more energy.

I think fitness is the least of our worries right now.

Agreed

If fitness was our problem, we would be getting burned in the last 15 minutes of each half, especially with our lack of ball retention.
The one clear issue, is that the players didn't up their game after Smith left, which indicates that our "assistant" coach was unable to get any form of response.

Whether our players simply aren't good enough for the comp, I don't know but, maybe some of the issues that Smith has intimated about, actually don't help.

Regarding Wigan, there is no doubt that their youngsters are very well drilled and when they hit U19's, they all seem capable of playing 1st team rugby to a very high level, something that we can only dream of.

We produce 1 or 2 good players in a season and they manage 10 or 12, which takes pressure of recruitment etc.

Can't think of anyone 'fat' in the team.