Quote: Ronzy "That all sounds very convincing, until you realise that Aiton missed a good portion of the season. To my mind, (I don't rely on stats) the vast majority of our plays ran through either Sinfield or McGuire.
I know you like illustration so, let's consider the Grand Final. One try arising from off the cuff play and that was an structured attack, which had broken down.'"
Aiton played every single regular season game, only starting once on the bench and often seeing Burrow not even get on until the 2nd half. Played in every round of the cup except the final and played about 50 mins of the opening Super 8's game vs Warrington before he broke his arm.
Whilst in some ways Ryan Hall's try will always be thought of as the thing that won us the LLS. What really did it (and got us the vital home advantage in the playoffs) was winning 10 of the opening 11 games. Aiton was one of our top 3 performers in that spell alongside Cuthbertson. Many forget because of how things ended but Sinfield was probably our poorest player in the opening 5 rounds before he got injured and seemed to be struggling to go with this new attacking style whereas other players were thriving under it.
Like I said the platform for last year's success was those opening 11 games. Sinfield was poor in the first 5, missed the next 3 through injury (impressive wins vs Cas and Catalans away and Wigan) and came off the bench at Saints when we'd already stormed into a big lead and Sutcliffe was having a big game and Burrow found very little game time also at this point (think he only got on with 10 mins left vs Cas). We racked up 362 points in those games at an average of almost 33 with only Warrington keeping us under 26 points. So it can be done attack wise without him.....ok maybe not enough to win titles come crunch games but definitely a hell of a lot better than what we've done so far and to go from highest points scorers to lowest.