They walk a thin line between niggly and cowardly, the latter not acceptable the prior being a decent trait.

Similar thing happened to us under Bluey.A one dimensional approach can have a great effect for a period if everyone buys into it but if not things can fall apart at the seams rather quickly as maybe happening at Wigan.

Still early days in the season and things can turn around quickly but it does appear that things are begining to unravel for Wane and Wigan.

If you are going out to intimidate and rough up the opposition then you have to be totally commited to it. When they did a job on us last year they were all in all the time. Every opportunity they came in numbers and isolated certain Leeds players, JP, Ablett and a couple of others got the treatment. They also p!$$ed about in numbers at every PTB. All that made it very difficult for a referee to control everything and Leeds players were made to look like they were also part of the problem.
Friday was just them playing at it. Without Flanders to lead the way with the cheap shots on grounded players they were half @r$ed and it was easy for the ref to penalise them. They did enough to get pinged but not enough to make Leeds players react. The likes of Batemen and Tomkins were just too obvious.

I'm always fascinated by the world that Wane lives in. It's clear he doesn't live in ours, every game they lose they have apparantly "dominated" enough to win. I strongly suspect that he has zero respect for anyone outside Wigan, but I don't know the guy so that might be a false assumption based on everything he says and does in public. My bad.

Flanders that's a great one

Nah just too busy laughing to bring myself to post.

Suggesting Lockers attacks players on the ground is a new one though.

Being the most aggressive team in the league won us the double. It was obviously going to get found out soon enough. We're just working on a plan B.

That's the thing though. Wigan haven't been found out, their style could still bring them success but the players don't seem to have the fire in their bellies that Wane would put into them that will make that style work ATM.

You wonder whether some of it is a Ben Flower hangover.

Wigan got a lot of press for all the wrong reasons after the Grand Final. You wonder whether the players are mentally walking a bit of a tightrope between going out and getting into people, and trying to rein it in a bit.

Every chance he gets he'll put a forearm into a grounded players face. He's a hard, tough and uncompromising player who makes sure you know it when he tackles you. In his early days he made many dentists very wealthy.

I have no real problem with the aggresive tactics Wigan use, I started watching the game in the early eighties where physically intimidating the opposition was as fundamental as passing and running. The problem is that referees are ill equiped these days to deal with it. They don't sort it out themselves and they don't allow other teams to sort it out properly. There are some players in your team who if playing in another era would simply have been knocked out on the pitch with little or no consequence. Widnes played the intimidation card to it's ultimate and other teams dealt with it. I saw Roy Dickinson lay out Les Gorley, who was stretchered off the pitch, and all the ref did was wave a finger at Roy. There was nobody more worthy of being knocked out than Les Gorley and the ref knew that. The sight of Paul Cullen being chased around Wilderspool by an enraged Eric Grothe still makes me smile.
Refs are trying to keep a game going, they know Wigan are using these tactics but can't penalise everything and RL is still a physical game, but it's only one half of the coin. If you allow these tactics to go unpunished then you should allow the appropriate response to go unpunished also. But that doesn't happen.

Who suggested that about Lockers? Now Flanders was caught bang to rights wasn't he?

Dunno what you're on about? He's played over 350 games and never been charged by the disciplinary.

This doesn't even deserve a response:

you obviously missed the pun when the poster Called the player who got sent off in the GF Flanders .You may be too young to remember the satirical singing Duo Michael Flanders and Donald Swan , FLANDERS and SWAN .