He’s seems to get a bit of stick tbh which I can’t understand. He’s a solid, consistent, no nonsense workhorse. He’s better in the back row.

Prior has been an upgrade on Merrin IMO

Consistency is a good word. He doesn't make many errors. If he's given a scorable chance, 99% of the time, he's gonna convert it.

The opposite can also be true, losing breeds losing. Take warrington, I think not getting over the line in the grand final has held them back, it get's the monkey off the back and affects the psyche of the club.

As an aside it was strange that there wasn't a single 6 again call for a ruck infringement yesterday. There were certainly cases.

I thought that. Very strange

There was at least 1 against Leeds ,
The fact was the game was reffed differently to any other game since lockdown

Good solid performance all round.
Myler for me edged MoM ahead of Prior and Ava.
Why anyone can have a go at Handley god only knows.
He constantly gets on the scoresheet.
Briscoe for all his faults this year and last had a decent game but our SR were pretty much not on their game for me.
Gotcha saying Myler had a poor game is more about wanting Walker in the team I guess.
The only thing I feel Agar got wrong was the selection of Sutcliffe over Smith and it looks like he was going for pace on the bench as opposed for bulk which almost backfired when Cuthbertson went off.
Thought Salford were unlucky to be penalised when incorrect play the ball from Pauli Pauli as it`s not as if it doesn`t happen a fair bit of the time anyway.
Saying that their try came from the 2nd knock on by Salford that should have been a Leeds ball and not back to the original first knock on.
Evalds the pick of the Salford players.

Agree with all the above other than i thought Mellor had a strong game.

Good analysis for me. Totally agree re the selection almost backfiring: I can only guess that Agar wanted more cover in the back line and A Sutcliffe fitted the bill. Cuthbo getting injured was just bad luck but I thought we didn't have as strong a presence down centre field as we could have, which caused us to struggle more than we did against Wigan.

We did look the better side throughout for me to be fair though. Salford were just incredibly tenacious and put some very smart team moves together. With some better execution they'd have had us; more than one clean break with numbers which they absolutely killed (with some great vision from our D to disrupt).

Evalds very good, I thought Watkins was excellent for them too. Brown was tricky. Mossop targeted big Mik all game and tried to put him off with some real aggression. Just goes to show though how Oledski has come on and garnered respect from opposition this year. Their big units were starting to cause us problems late game too.

Maybe not a classic on absolute quality (although there were plenty of quality moments), but a real classic in terms of competitiveness and enjoyment.

finals usually are

No disrespect to Salford but Leeds won it in the semi against Wigan. Not just the results but the strength of the performance.

So glad we sneaked it, but you could see the belief even though they were playing poorly second half, I was always confident.

On an aside, Watkins is still all class. Great hands, great feet.

Correct

Such a strange season, such a strange world we live in right now. There is a bit of joy in that team now, good to see and really looks like things are building.

I don't know how you play in a final like that in an empty stadium but both teams were extraordinary under the circumstances.

Think Prior gets the grief because people expect any overseas import that comes over is going to be a Buderus or Ali!

Thing I have taken from all this is how much noise the club made about bringing in "the right people not just the right players" and I think we are starting to see a bit of that. Obviously a first win for a lot of them so bound to be a big one for them but you can certainly see how much it means and it all seems to be for the right reason. Both Ava and Handley gave pretty emotional interviews.

We've probably all seen the spirit of the Rhino thing JJB came up with. I really do think he deserves some credit after the stick he was given for getting a "job for the boys". I know we'll never know for certain I reckon a lot of the closeness we see in the current squad comes back to that time and those conversations.