just what ive been thinking for the last few years. when we were under noble one of his main points was the defence and look what we did when he coached us

The pitch was described as a mud bath. That evens the teams out. Not taking anything away from our defence, but the real test will come next week against Wigan when the pitch isn't like the a swamp

Pitch wasn't actually too bad. Certainly muddy but calling it a mud bath is going too far imo

We were better than Cas up front and that meant we could control the ruck. When Cas moved it wide we had Chase and Orr well covered.

We should be well used to inconsistency by now, jusy hope we start to see more performances that have the guts and commitment we showed today.

That's what makes the difference - winning the collision. We hardly ever did that against the massive Catalans pack, but as I said earlier in the week our forwards were far more evenly matched against Cas - even without Elima and Manase (acknowledging Cas had some missing too).

Easy, our pack beat their pack. Not a walkover, mind you, but overall our pack came out quite handsomely on top. Whitehead, in particular, had a lot to do with that. He really is a talent.

Let's hope these positive trends continue. I have given up hoping that we will ever stop making dumb mistakes and giving up cheap ground and possession, I reckon it must be the personnel we've got aren't technically good enough. It can't be either a jinx, co-incidence or bad luck to keep making the same mistakes year on year. Still, we do have the ability, and this year seemingly the will, to overcome shooting ourselves repeatedly in the foot, at least against the lesser sides. It will still cost us big time if we do it against the better teams, but the we aren't dreaming of a top four spot.

The encouraging thing was that it looks like we do have the half backs to take advantage of it when we are on the front foot, and Gale in particular continued to progress, he looks the best we've had for a while on the limited games so far. And Sammut looks a very handy acquisition.

The other encouraging thing was, like against Cats, we again looked up for it, and again worked very hard the full 80, keeping going right to the end.