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| The first thing we've got to realise is we lost to a class outfit today who will be in the top four, if not then they'll be 5th.
Individual mistakes in defence (particularly in the first half) killed the game off. That needs to be addressed.
Koppy, Sammut and Kear all put themselves about well. Particularly impressed with the spark you get from Sammut. Langley was poor and quite frankly, I look at the team and wonder where he fits into it now. Walker for me as well, had a shocker. Sooner Lulia is in the side the better.
Still, there is NO reason to assume we're going to finish bottom or anything like that. We've had one game! But plenty to work on.
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| It was an extremely disappointing afternoon, and on the face of it, not much to be optimistic about. And yet.
First of all, for practically all the game, we never did anything. At all. Yes, we went through the mechanics of the game, much of the tackling was not bad, some of the basic attacking play was not bad, but it seemed as if we could never rise above the "not bad".
Nothing happened. Ever.
The most excitement was Langley's diagonal run for his try, apart from that, it reminded me of one of those old fashioned wrestling matches, where each week they put in one of the blokes you had never heard of to be the whipping boy, and told him he was only allowed to go through the basic motions, but don't do anything flash or detract from the main man, until the xth round, when you go down.
Catalans looked in a decent groove already, and one very big difference between teh two teams was that they looked and are a team where they all know each other's game, know where they'll go and what they'll do, and are now working on the finer points. Whereas we look like a bunch of strangers, which largely, we are.
Someone asked me before the game how I thought we'd go. I said that I thought we had bought well enough, but because we are a brand new team, it would take at least 2 months for me to expect the team to have developed anything like an understanding, and to start to gel as a team. After the game, I am not sure 2 months wasn't optimistic.
Gale was a bit of an Awfor, he showed some good touches, but was never near dictating any play, yet I feel I can hardly criticise him when he was behind a pack that was utterly dominated from start to finish. It was men against boys, and this is where our season may get stuck. We haven't, on today's showing, got a competitive pack. Kopczak showed some dog, the rest were pretty ordinary. Sammut was Sammut, in flashes, but again there's no opportunity to shine when your pack is being paggered, and I also liked the look of Kear, and Purtell did some good things.
The scoreline is not a fair reflection of the game, though. We deserved to lose by far more. Probably only the conditions kept it down.
Despite a bit of the headless chicken syndrome, I would not fault the team for lack of effort. I kept an eye on them after each score, and you could see that it was hurting. And there is no doubt that we did slowly improve as the game went on, and again, I have no doubt that we kept on trying to the end. And that is itself a major improvement on some of our recent performances.
If it has not dented the confidence too much, I think we will have come on a lot for having had a fully competitive and adverse 80 minutes. I genuinely believe that there is a lot of potential in that side, but I had hoped for much better for their first outing. I hope they all spend a lot of time watching the video.
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