No Smith or Wilkin available for Friday. Is that a blessing in disguise or a loss to the team?

From the Saints fans I speak to and blogs/forums I read lots of mixed feelings regarding the pair, bit like Marmite, love em or hate em.

As we stand now I feel its a loss, but there are better players out there that we should have in those positions at saints I feel for next season.

Thoughts?

We are lacking leadership for this game, so I assume Roby is going to step up. Quite a few players in the pack are playing below par so they need to get our new half back partnership on the front foot.
The remaining 3 games have to be wins to give us that slim chance in the 8's, so I don,t see why we can start tomorrow with or without Wilkin and Smith.

I think it represents the state that we're in when we regard Wilkin as our leader. This situation must be solved next season. We are desperately short of packleader and also a captain.

I don't think we missed any of them. Peyroux had a good game and imo offered more than Wilkin with ball in hand but Wilkin does get through hell of alot of tackles.

I would like an unchanged starting 13 next week, remove Lee from the bench and put Wlikin there.

I thought young Richardson did good as well and no worse than smith this year . In fact Richardson took the line on more than smith and the way he set up for the drop goal was more business like than Matty smith has done this year. Smith drop goal against Salford was excellent more he bombed a few this year due to poor game management.

I'd keep same 13 also

Thought the side looked more balanced against Hull. Richardson seemed comfortable playing on the right.
My main issue was lack of composure when Hull started to put us under pressure late in the game. We started to panic a bit. I think this is were the experience of Wilkin and Smith would come into play by slowing the game down.

Interesting to see how dangerous Peyroux looked when being put into gaps from passes.

Still think our passing accuracy is appalling though. Just watch the NRL their passes are on the button more often or not.
Ours are high, low or behind the man, and this is contributing to not only high error counts but also lack of speed in moving the ball, and thereby creating scoring opportunities.

Richardson composure for the drop goal was that if a experienced halfback..other than smiths winner against Salford he has lacked composure for his drop goals and that's supposed to be his biggest asset.

I'd stick with same 13 next week

We're just struggling through the changes to our style. We're now playing the right way, but just doing it very badly. In terms of form, execution and sharpness, we're miles away. I'd love to hear what Holbrook thinks of James Roby as a player. He obviously hasn't seen him at his best and his distribution since he's been here has been terrible.

Saints at the moment just need to go back to basics, as in right back. They should be coached like a 10 year old is, repeated drills, passing the ball along the line to improve their skills. We need to work harder to get quick play the balls and need to be sharper from dummy half. Nice crisp passing, rather than the dross we're serving up at the moment.

On the plus side I think that Saints are looking far fitter than they were under KC. Give Holebrook a full pre season and we will see a far better Saints side.

I'm looking forward to see what Justin Holbrook can do with this team next year. I'm pretty disappointed he's not brought and attacking plays in since he arrived, it's been pretty much te same poor rugby we had with KC.

I know it's tough coming into a poor team lacking confidence but I would like to have seen him add something to our attack.

Maybe he's just finding his feet at the moment and sizing up the players

Regards

King James

I think we are seeing more quicker passing plays to the edges in attack but a lot of it is sideways movement at the moment, we've not seen much attack with set plays most of it is off the cuff stuff. Maybe Holbrook is seeing some difficulty in setting things up with Smith in the side and is working on Fages to put some creativity back into the team.
Since Holbrook has come in it seems Roby is playing with his head up a bit more and doing a few more scoots, to be honest we don't really know if Holbrook is going to be any good and is just making small changes which the fans are probably not seeing as anything significant.