One thing you cannot coach, is natural attacking ability,

Defensive positioning,and technique is coachable.

IF Hall left,and with the right coaching, could IMHO, come back to haunt us.

Yet our coaches appear to have been spot on with defensive coaching (barring the odd game),for most of our players??
Hall will never come back and haunt us, most teams would have the Senior like players running at Hall and then Hall would do his headless chicken act..

Are you being ironic or do you actually believe that?

Our defence has been largely cr4p since sharp left

Not a case of believing the [ustats do not lie[/u..our defence is certainly not crap(barring the odd game)!!

Our defence in the main this season has been very good.

Hall has had 3 / 4 seasons of Superleague training under his belt now, and his defence is still woeful.

I think people are calling him ‘windy’ due to seeing him seemingly unwilling to get his shoulder in and take the collision. Maybe this is because he’s a couple of stone lighter than his opposite number, maybe a lack of aggression/confidence, maybe just pi$$poor technique. He tends to grab and flap, he reminds me of Paul Cooke when in his first couple of seasons. His eyes close, he pulls his head back and holds his arms up infront of his chest.

Also lately, particularly when at centre, he keeps shooting out of the defensive line looking for an intercept or tackle – usually resulting in the rest of the team being put on further unnecessary pressure.

Craig Hall is not of Super League standard. The amount of handling errors made over the past few seasons highlights my point. His defence is poor in every game and often in close games, this means we lose it. Every team target him. He is good in attack, when he can catch it but that is not good enough at this level. Thought he had a chance when he was in first year but has made zero progress in defence since and therefore is not worth another contract. A liability we need to be rid of. Another young player not to fulfil potential at our club.

In the last 2 years our defence has conceded over 200 points more than the best defence in SL each year. This year at the 1/2 way stage it's already around 100.

We've conceded over 40 points 3 times already this season and did it 4 times last year.

If you can show me these stats you're talking about then maybe they will change my opinion that our defence is average at best

That's certainly why I'm saying he's windy, yes.

That's exactly what i mean.

I believe Craig Hall defence is still shocking his postional awareness is his main problem and that he just flicks out an arm at times .I dont feel people are being unfair on him just the way it is and bet most teams target him like leeds did .

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funny that you would think that former players would not call themselves windy huh??
I have in my close circle of friends two former FC players and one who works for us who would tell you different, but your right Mr friend to the stars huh

!!!

Correct 110%
He has no bottle, no technique and no power in the tackle and fannies around slapping across the chest every single game he plays and looks like a rabbit in headlights every time anyone runs directly at him!!
I would bet a testicle that every other SL coach designates him as the weak spot every time they play FC hence why they run at him all day long and as sure as houses they run tries past him !!

windy , coward, yella what ever you want to call him he is not SL level!!

We started pretty well this season defensively but have fallen off badly in a number of games. Our line speed is not what it was earlier in the season and we generally dont get as many in the tackle as the opposition which contributes to why it always seems the opposition get much faster ptbs than we do. I still have concerns over our fitness levels. I think the effort is there but I think other teams with better defensive records are fitter and more able to defend with the required intensity for longer.

agree totally, we also have an issue with shooting out of the line by certain players that disrupts the pattern of defence that does not help either

wakey had no difficulty in making 50+ metres on most sets on Friday. I'm still waiting for this massive pack to turn up for Hull who are going to be bossing every other pack in SL

not a lot of that was down the middle you may recal

Plenty of it was down the middle. They weren't capable of shipping it wide regularly

I wouldn't want to criticise our defence on Friday as it won us the match. Until 78 mins we only conceded one try from a kick. That hasn't been the case in several other games this season, in particular games against sides who have struggled to score points against other teams. The likes of Salford/Crusaders should not be scoring 20+ points against us.

On the other hand our attack on Friday was poor and with Horne struggling on his return from injury meaning we had no halves (yet again) it isn't entirely surprising, but still very disappointing.

I think aspects of our defence were excellent, and other aspects not so good. Our goal line defence won us the match, but (as JTP pointed out) they made far too much ground further up the pitch.

They made decent progress down the middle. The week before, Leeds tore through our middle defence at will.

The fact our forwards struggled to dominate was one of the main issues for our backs IMO

I doubt we'd have beaten many teams of Friday TBH. Wakey were really dire

I doubt many teams would have won with 7 key players out, in fact I remeber Leeds losing to Rovers, Wakey and Cas during their injury crisis.

cant disagree with you there , however we were particularly poor that day