Reality not excuses, shocking forward pass missed and as highlighted by commentators and SOL the penalty at the ruck was contra to everything both sides had been doing/allowed to do
You're the better team by far, making easy metres, better kicks, attack miles better but you don't need poor decisions from the officials to win it.

hahahaha oh my

Our try came from a ridiculous forward pass too!

How on earth is that missed at this level?

That said, those half time stats are damning. 13/17 sets completed and 33 missed tackles is just terrible.

3 of our senior players in SOL, Graham and Widdop have made awful errors at keys places on the field.

A defensive full back would help. Lomax is awful in defence. He stood and watched the first Australian try right in front of him. He offers a lot in attack but not enough to counterbalance.

Key difference is SL players are used to 2-3 secs extra at every PTB while they beg the ref for a penalty where AUS just want to get off the deck and play quick.

No it didn't, but if by your viewpoint it did the forward pass for the 1st aussie try was a gridiron style pass by comparison.
Ours was flat at the worst.

The other thing is they are used to a rest every five minutes for a penalty. 1 penalty in a half is unheard of in Super League.

The single most important difference is the kicking game. Gale has kicked teams to death in SL all year. He needs to find a bit of that quickly. The Aussies need to be starting their sets in their own twenty, or this is only going one way.

Crying out for Sneyds kicking and game management

Seemed a soft penalty against O'Loughlin. It didn't look a great deal worse than many of the others.

Shame the ref missed that touch by the Aussie hand that would have given us another set of six in a good position.

Overall Australia are clearly better but we're hanging in there and defending really well most of the time.

Hopefully we can get a bit more possession in their half. We haven't had much apart from the try.

He wouldn't be any better because our pack isn't getting them on the foot.

Same old story, Australia just asphyxiate the game by excellent kicking, late and early, with ours being predictable and lacking.

poms are doing ok scrambling in defence, whilst their defence has been poor in midfield, they are desperately getting to the tackle close to the line

I suspect that they won't be able to keep it up though, Australia look rusty, they should run away with it if they can get some rhythm

They also play more games. Kallum Watkins is playing his 33rd game today. The player with the most apperances in the Australia team this season (Morgan) is playing his 27th.

We seriously need to tackle this stupid idea that Super League clubs cannot be sustainable businesses unless they flog their players to the brink.