Gonna be a long, hard season. Or it may be over next week. We needed 4 points from the 1st 2 games badly, and we aren't going to have them.

Two pretty poor sides on show today. The main difference was that the Bulls killed themselves off, by repeated stupid infirngements, giving themselves extra sets to defend, but much worse, on at least 3 occasions, criminally handing the ball to Cas on the 1st or zero tackle inside our own 20.

All this meant that we had so much extra defensive work to do, it was just inevitable that we would be the team that ran out of steam. You could see the collapse coming; when Cas did the length of the field move, nobody at any stage was coming out to meet them, we were all fooked, standing about and back pedalling. Anybody can score against you if you do that.

Gale is too erratic. He started the rot with an awful last tackle play early in the second half that put us under pressure, and he put us under even more pressure late in the half when he had a hissy fit and shoved himself into the tackled player, which he must have know the ref would penalise. Idiot. I don't care about the reason, it was just unprofessional.

Thought our MOM was Purtell, by a long way. Shame he couldn't go the length on that run, but he worked so hard and was everywhere. Don't know what Gaskell's role was supposed to be. If he is to replace Sammut then somebody needs to come up with a plan for what they actually want him to do.

Addy and Scruton did OK, and i felt sorry for Kear doing 90 metres, only to be called back. It was nice that he got an ovation as he made his way back.

On the strength of that, if we do get any points docked, then we are good as down. We will struggle anyway if we cannot somehow teach the team to respect possession, but that has been a very longstanding bugbear. Wakey next week really is do or die, early in the season though it is.

This. If he can defend when he needs to every week, in the centres, like he did then that will be outstanding. For a centre.

Honestly thought there were 2 major turning points in the game. At 6-0 up Purtell made that break and Gale kicked it out on the full. If it had gone down the line through hands we would have scored and probably kicked on from there.

The second major turning point was when Castleford decided to introduce Lynch to the pitch. He made 10 plus metres everytime (as did one or two others) but a fit Lynch showed our tired forwards how it should be done. And his offloads were dangerous.

Other than being annoyed at missed tackles I suppose we all expected something like this given the calibre of players that have left and the week building up to the game.

Generally thought we missed Langley today. And also please tell me why the current set of players insist on tackling Justin Carney high instead of low? He's probably the biggest winger in SL in terms of build :/

If you go low on Carney he palms you off, and if you go high you bounce of him. He's a tank.

Is that the fat one?

Tackle his legs? Or is that too obvious?