The kicking game was excellent last week, but went missing today. Smith and Craven were the difference today. Some real brainfarts too, when we do much wrong last week.

Still think we'll be ok, but we could soon be 1 from 5...

Two evenly matched teams . Could of gone either way . Just felt that their Halfbacks kicked better. Tyler Dupree another local lad had a strong game for Widnes.
Not sure how we have ended up with Martin at fullback. Is he mates with Finn and Grixy??
Hopefully we will see Walmsley come back into side.

Was always going to be a tight game. Like last week I thought Gwaze and Fairbank gave us the impetus when they were on. We were dominating the 2nd half through basic play and completing our sets with solid defence - that's all it needed. Then 2 mistakes in sucession, a knock on from an unnecessary forced pass and a cheap offside from resulting scrum, gave them territory and momentum we didn't seem to recover from.

As for team/subs selection, I didn't get the subs with the weather. I'd have rather gambled on an extra forward in Morris.

As has been said above the difference was the kicking game and ours was awful in the first half giving them multiple 7 tackle sets. Discipline as well was poor but that has been a staple of Grix's team so not really much that can be said about that. Playing a game in a mudbath like that with just 16 players makes absolutley no sense whats so ever and Im not sure what point Grix is trying to make in doing that. Moore ran round like a headless chicken for a lot of the second half and made multiple mistakes but Joufrett is still not good enough to get on the pitch. Id love to know the plan with that as he may as well have picked Elliot Morris and had another forward on the bench that could have offered an impact. The jobs for the boys act at fullback is not working and Im not sure what we would lose by having Walmsley on the wing and Salty at FB.

Its not a disaster as I see that as a game we would have won on a decent pitch as I thought we did look better with the ball but we are now 1 from 3 with 3 tough games coming up that we will do well to win anymore than 1 from and an injury list that is stacking up to the point where like at the end of last season we look down to the bare bones especially if we are saying some of our new signings are not good enough now.

Aye, some of SG's selections/tactics are starting to look alarmingly strange. At 0v8 down and looking to be going nowhere I said if we somehow get it back to 8v8 just go for the one pointer at any possible opportunity. We didn't, Widnes did.

Aye, kicking game plaudits go to Smithy and Danny C today, we just couldn't get the range, either too short or too long and the 7 T sets as a result.
Discipline,Penalties,Position again, arrrrrrrrrrgh, must have been at least a 3 to 1 count against.
Maybe there's a connection with the injuries and us now largely back to the same pack and serial offenders from the recent past, hard to see why without watching reruns but easy to see the outcome.

Positives, good D and restricted a team who had racked up points in their last 3 to one try off a last tackle up and under that on another day could have been cleaned up.
On the rare occasion when we had some field position we looked dangerous in attack, we just didn't have enough of it to make it count.

Other news.
Games / Injuries, well we're 1 from 3 and 5 key players short with Knowles out for the season at least, Gee, Worthington and possibly Wood months away and JWH a few weeks off, 3 of our other signings not getting a start and one other going back to Siddal, not good, not good at all.

Poor set completion poor kick choice and execution especially in the first half and conceding penalties was the story yet again. Grix keeps mentioning brain explosions , maybe it’s time some players saw a shrink or readjusted earring aids because this brain explosion thing seems to have been happening for some time . It’s a long season and I’m sure things will improve ( probably not for a while with fev and Leigh on the horizon) gwaze looks a Find , I’ve been impressed with him runs hard tackles hard does big minutes and follows the gameplan . We’ve played 240 minutes of rugby and played well for about 75 mins that’s over 2 full games poor performance, imagine where we’d be if we could reverse that statistic.

Nowt changes, does it?

Said it last year will say it again Grix is not the man for the job do not care if we got 3rd last year.

His team selections are shocking. Two star signings not getting any game time LW had a bad game like many others against batley but he as not played since. Why have Jufret on the bench and not play him at all. We need a full back and another forward fast. Could of easily had LW or Joufret at fb who are both far better than martin

Personally I like Grix , his communication skills have improved with the media and he comes across well in his interviews. As regards ‘ star players ‘ we have signed , you get picked on form not status and I’m pretty sure subjectively Grix doesn’t look at them as stars , Grix played under one of the best coaches of super league in tony smith he played in grand finals he played with legends like lee briers , Adrian Morley etc in pretty sure he isn’t remotely intimidated by Lachlan walmsley and Louis jouffret. Personally I don’t understand the jouffret thing but then again I don’t spend all week analysing the games or working with them in training and neither do I have Simon Grixs ‘ cv , we didn’t lose against Batley or Widnes because of grixs’ coaching decisions we lost because of individual errors or individuals giving silly penalties away . It’s seems pretty obvious why Grix picked salty , barber , arundal , McComb: the pitch and weather and injuries, all them players make yards on slow pitches and are defensively sound . I actually thought Martin played pretty well yesterday. Halifax have actually only conceded 1 try in 160 mins and I reckon we’ve defended significantly more sets than the opposition in our own half because of ill discipline and look defensively sound , once the weather improves so will our attacking play .

I think we should have won this game. Widnes looked the stronger in the first half on the back of a good kicking game. We doggedly held them out apart from a testing kick. Gradually got on top and had Widnes rocking and then attempted a drop goal in a swamp that would only have got us level. The better option imho would be put a decent grubber in and at least they would have started that set near the line. Instead 7 tackles from the twenty and the game was done!
As i have previously reported a Batley fan said we would not see Jouffret until the sun came out.