Gaskell looked overwhelmed tonight. I hope he was just being eased back into the side, but very few plays went through him, apart from kicks. He was defending in the left centre position all game, with Jones moving inside him.

He didn't have the best of games, but he got some awful, awful passes from Roby tonight. He must have had 3 or 4 hospital passes from him tonight. It's hard to impose yourself on a game as a halfback when your team is so dominated for such long spells in the game.

excuses, excuses, excuses. He's not good enough full stop.

On that basis quite a few aint,with Hoahia at the top of the list.

I don't think he looked overwhelmed. I think he looked underused, which is entirely different. Wilkin seemed to be the halfback in reality. And I don't know what it was with Robes and his drop off passes but he must have had his worst game that I can remember last night. Either that or he was told by the coaching staff just to do lots of drop off passes!

How badly do you think Rovers coach breaking down and getting to your place late might have effected there start to the game?

We,ve had loads of games like this, when the defence is moving up quickly from an offside position and we have a flat attack, the drop off is not an option. Mike Rush needs to change tactic and use 2nd Phase through Gaskell, we were more effective on 2nd Phase with Leon Pyrce operating it.
Service to Shenton was poor again, passing to him again semi static with only the cul de sac to run into. Josh Jones is a really good player in this scenario, running back to create more space for himself and using his footwork and swerve to open up play.
We don,t seem to have a plan when teams make a comeback against us, i,ve not seen one anyway.

Surely the win would suggests we did cope with the comeback.

We coped, but the post you seemed to be replying to suggested that we don't have a plan, which we certainly don't appear to have.

For example, why did we opt to run the ball when a kickable penalty was offered to us? That was the occasion when Lomax dropped the ball on the way to the line. We were under real pressure at that point - I can't remember whether we were actually losing but we weren't far off. I was really annoyed at the match that we fell for that stupid idea that we should run our penalties. Had we kicked, we would have secured two points when we badly needed the points, got the ball back and had another chance at a try to turn it into eight. Instead we got zip and put more pressure on ourselves. Ridiculous.

Suggests to me that you where lucky that we had a 3 hour delay on the motorway. If we had arrived earlier then 19:20 to Langtree park then that abysmal 25 minutes would never have happened.

I wouldn't disagree with that!