It's the halfbacks fault that our props look poor?

Quinlan is 6th in the league for average gain per carry. Swift is 12th. Turner is 22nd and Makinson is 25th. So out of the top 25 players in the league for metres gained per carry, 4 are our backs. Even Dawson is 42nd. Hardly indicative of the main problem being our backs not making any metres.

All Quinlans meters are from backing up and those break away breaks he's had. The guy is the worst kick returner ive ever seen. He looks for swifty every time off kick and of he's not there he basically dead on his kick returns.

Lfc Saint is 100% right and ive been saying it for a while. That first carry off the kick is the most important carry in the set. That first carry more or less makes or breaks if you get on the front foot and our back three are terrible on kick returns. Quinlan doesn't like contact so goes on soft and is dead, Matty Dawson is just Matty dawson, Fleming doesn't return well but Swifty can.

Phil clarke said early on in the season that our back three of swifty, Tommy (he's back agsinst hudds) and lomax made more meters from kick returns as a back three than any team in super league. It's no coincidence that we went unbeaten in those and our pack looked very good.

This has been happening quite a while now and with our very flat attack its "easy meat" for the opposition, the only forward who runs from deep is Walmsley he normally hangs back a couple of metres to get a forward drive, the rest of our pack is flat footed, particularly Amor who gets the ball almost static and gets mauled and has to rely on brute strength to make hard yards.
Last night Roby and Walmsley made 332 metres between them while the rest of the pack (7 players) only made 470 metres between them.

The big picture though its not all about making metres, defence is first and foremost, our tackling technique and impact is atrocious, we missed 46 tackles last night (similar to the Leeds games) Thompson (icon_cool.gif, Flanners (5) and Greenwood (4) are the culprits this week in the pack. I think Hull made around 32 tackle busts last night, one of the worst stats this season in a game. We need to sort our defence out first, otherwise we are just swimming against the tide, stop the opposition then you have less to do on offence.

Do we think the defence is a technique/organisational problem or a attitude problem?

We were pretty good in defence for our first 5 super league games this season (average under 2 conceded try's per game) and our games with the Goons, so the technique has been there. KC seems to be over using our sliding scrambling defence technique instead of dominating the ruck area so that for me is a coaching problem.

The attitude problem is not new and manifests itself with poor form, I can,t see this being 100% contributed to KC, some players rise above it with mental toughness, we are not blessed with players with leadership qualities (Wellens gone, Wilkin injured) and strength of character to pull us out of a dip in form.

We missed another 40+ tackles yesterday, KC has only mentioned post match of % completions of sets when he should be looking at having some control of the game in defence. Good defence is a positive that strengthens attitude in other parts of the game, a professional player should know this automatically.

I was just about to read this thread and then I saw who posted it.

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