That's probably because we still had Cunningham (a seriously influential presence in our team) and Gidley (with Longy still around in the first season). Pryce was playing for most of the time Potter was here and Eastmond too. Look at what we have had to play with for the whole of this season and yet we are in third spot today.


The only young players to have regular first team spots under Potter were Foster and Dixon. Everybody else had bit parts (some hardly featured). Makinson (our present right wing) had yet to make his debut, as indeed had a number of u20s players who have played for us this season. This Potter did great with the youth mantra is seriously over done.

Potter had an ideal chance to utilise Gaskell and Lomax as Simmons has done as we were without halfbacks for the final third of the season last year, but he went with Moore and Wilkin instead, giving Gaskell all of 1.5 games.

He's doing really well with Bradford.

Pryce was not fit enough for 80 mins of RL at that intesity and pace.
Two or three games back he should have either not played him or interchanged with Gaskell in both halves. Wigan have Hock back with 3 or 4 games and he wasn't in the 17 for those very same reasons.
Under Mcguire Wigan have faced Saints seven times. Wigan have won 5, drawn one and lost one. Maybe it's more about Wigan's coach than Potter or Simmons.

I can't see anybody mentioning this but a really telling stat from Saturday was that we managed three offloads during the game and they were all from Wilkin who is not really an offloading master. We have turned into Hull KR but with better players.

It's okay praising our ball retention but it didn't lead to anything. In most Super League games ball retention leads to a win, however when you're eating at the top table you need more than that especially when you're playing against a defence that can soak up forward runs down the middle.

Who is praising our ball retention? Our ball retention was shocking.

It wasn't. We made some errors, but we pretty much completed most of our sets.

There were a minimum of eight. I might have forgotten some. Knocking on eight times, not under pressure either, is no way to win any game much less a knock-out match, especially when at least three of those knock-ons happened in attack on their line.

Saints make all those meters but just don't do enough when they get there.

I also think Wigan share the workload better than saints do.

I said at the game that Roby and Puletua were your best players. Both of them are awesome.

I don't rate Wilking but 50 tackles is fantastic.

We had a very slow start to the season, which could be attributed to a number of things. I was personally tearing my hair out and we we lost to Quins at home I threw my toys firmly out of the pram! Since then we have improved immensly, though, and the rugby's been enjoyable to watch.
We seem nervous when we play Wigan. The fact that we had all that possesion early on without scoring, only to manage two slick tries when it looked as though the game was lost, sums that up for me.
As fear the Vee said, we've a poor record against our top 3 competetors, and if we don't win on Friday I'll be mighty dissapointed, but we've seen off the next best (Leeds in particular) reasonably comprehensively.
We're behind where we could be at this point with Royce, which is a shame, but I think the longer we go through the season the closer we'll get to the best. Hopefully with a settled off season we'll hit the ground running next year (and as a bonus we'll not have an opposition team coached by McGuire) and be a true force, rather than an also ran. I do think this squad could win trophies with Royce as coach.

Pryce is class, he'll have his edge back by the end of the season so those gaps he saw he'll get through again (assuming his injury hasn't ruined him, but I'm sure it hasn't). Leon is as hard to handle as any back in the league. His mere presence with the ball cracked Catalan t'other week.

Not one will slag off Wellens excessively, as he's a club legend, but i'm afraid the ball dies when it gets to him. Against lesser defences, he gets that extra split second to make things work, but not against the top teams. He wasn't helped on Saturday by the fact we seemed to be using the same move time and time again so we weren't exactly foxing the defence, but I reckon if eastmond had been at #1 we have likely cracked you at least once in that period of territorial dominance.

It's tough with a player like Wellens - but someone needs to have the balls to drop him for the big games.

You don't get scared as an opposition fan when he tries to chime in to the line.

Its was a split discussion for posters wanting to stick with Wellens or go for Eastmond at full back (who wasn't actually available in the end). I'd plump for eastmond every time. I don't know whether he'd have taken Charnley down when Wello did, but I reckon he'd have done better for Charnley's try and I think he could have broken the deadlock in the 1st half if we'd had him attacking.

Of course he would have stopped Charnley. Charnley made a right mess of it. He should have run inside more to open up the space to go outside Wello, but he didn't, he just ran in a straight line and didn't do anything. He's not a natural winger, no in and out style in his locker. His second run was just embarassing defending.

It just shows that stats do not cover having a cutting edge and true game breakers. The stats prove that we do not need to "work harder" or "complete our sets" but actually find a way to open a defense with a single play.

We need to let go of our safety blanket Wello and get an extra playmaker on the field.

We did need to work harder - than the previous time we met Wigan (Stobart). But Pryce let us down badly on Saturday and so did Wellens. Between them they created a series of errors, which was very disappointing given the dominance of our forwards (the thing we had lacked last time we met the goons).

If we manage to put together the hard work in the forwards AND creativity in the halves/fullback, we will beat Wigan. We have the right game plan; we just need the execution to take our chances when they appear.

Nail on the head. Our pack did their job, and the likes of Martyn/Long would have had a field day in the first half. The platform was there for all to see.