Lowes has not shown that he is a top class coach by any means. He has done the first part, and got us to the MPG. ANyone can criticize any coach, you can never please everybody, and rookies do make mistakes, but we can put all that to one side as he achieved the first goal. Which nobody else - not even the vaunted Paul Rowley and his seasoned Leigh team - did.

But when it came to part 2 - the MPG - Lowes fell short. A coach stands or falls by his decisions, and the way i saw it, on the day, taking everything into account, there was a way that we could and maybe should have won, but we were unable to. Everyone has their own opinions but to me, several of Lowes' decisions contributed to our being unable to punish a poor and desperate Wakefield side, in strife, and missing some decent players.
a) his perseverance with Siejka. A decent scrum half could have won us the game if he had got as much ball in as much good field position as Siejka had.
b) he chose the squad he believed would do the job, and would have taken the credit had we won, but as we lost, he carries the can. The fears voiced by many of dropping pace from the team, playing players out of position, wasting a bench spot with Lauaki, can all be viewed as sadly well-founded.

Even then, I suspect that the Lee Gaskell that took the division by storm, had he been available, would have won us the game. It's harsh to blame Lowes for picking him, but then I don't know what he knew about his sharpness and readiness, and maybe that was not the right decision either, as he was a pale shadow of what he can be.

And even after all that, I think maybe his craziest decision of the season was to tell Addy to go for 2 points with that kick. That was Lowes running scared and trying not to lose. He lost fait in his team, and decided that we couldn't score a winning try, so chose to try to tie the scores. The death or glory play on was the only option, for me, and I still can't believe he did it, letting the game fizzle out like it did. If I had been Purtell I would have ignored Lowes and got the kick for touch taken before Lowes could do anything about it.

Who said he spat?

Well I knew you were going to say that.