As I understand it, Bailey hadn't trained with the first team prior to the game.

What,s the situation with Charnock is he injured or out of favour, I thought him or Hewitt would have been better suited to the less intensive Hull game.

The important point is that in three defeats we haven't thrown the towel in.

I'm not particularly bothered with the losses against Wigan and Wind Tunnell KR because both have decent backs who can pile up points quickly. The Hull performance was very disappointing because they are undoubtedly the worst side I've seen in Super League.

Thankfully, we've got a lot of points on the board early. I expected this trough. It happened last season. It's just not possible for any side to go through the entire season at top form. And we certainly don't want to be anywhere close to that at this precise point in the campaign.

If I do have one relatively minor criticism - it is that we haven't promoted as many young backs from the juniors as we have young forwards both at the end of last season and the beginning of this.

You really don't want to be picking kids completely out of the blue to prop up an injury ravaged first team. It's bad for their development. Perhaps we should have thought more about turning a sub slot over to a young back one in two or three games.

Of course, you can never predict injury crises in advance. But as "fast tracks" go ours looks decidedly two-speed with an autobahn turned over to props and back-row forwards and a measly dirt track for anything numbered one through seven.

It could be that KC & Long aren't particularly confident about this cohort of juniors.

I thought Brown said about Hewitt that he'd get chances this year, but with KC in charge this has changed.

Few weeks I've been told

Anybody who has seen Bailey play will know that he is a weak defender. So why put him on the wing where he will have to make more tackles than he would in his normal position of fullback?

His tackling wasn't the problem.

He didn't really have to do much defending. I can't recall him missing a tackle really either. The one for the try he had no chance really.

It was kicks he struggled on.

Not sure whether it's a coaching challenge so much as a scouting challenge.

What I wonder about is our inability to find big backs. Wigan seem to have a production line of 6'0+ athletes who can shift a bit too : Burgess, Manfredi, Gelling are all considerably bigger than anyone we have in the backs. Leeds also have no problem producing or procuring big lads for the threequarters and fullback. Yet our backs production line seems to be based in Lilliput. Makinson and Swift are tiny, as is Lomax. Percival is a slip of a lad, and even Jones is hardly huge, despite playing second row a bit. None of this would mater, of course, if they were fast as whippets with the evasive skills of a particularly slippery eel, but they're not. They're moderately fast, small guys. And as RL is such a physical game, perhaps we shouldn't be overly surprised that a lot of our small backs have spent a fair bit of time injured : Wheeler, Lomax, Percival.

As someone born and bred in St Helens, I recognise that many of my fellow Sintelliners may be more broad than tall, but at 6 foot I wasn't a freak ! Yet even our homegrown forwards tend to be on the small side. Beefy, but short. Clough-clones. So where are the big lads coming up through the youth teams ? Where are our equivalents of Burgess and Manfredi, Hardaker and Watkins ? Get some size in there !

We were asking that exact question during and after the game