Predictions 2017

Quote: Fully "It's a poor excuse about not pushing hard. All professional sports people want to win. There may be complacency at times but I think every club goes into a season wanting to finish top of the pile. You did well in your treble winning season because it was the last one with that generation playing together, undoubtedly a factor.'"

I think the supporters of most those top teams during the years of Top 8 playoffs will disagree with you on the team's pushing as hard they could. The number 1 priority became peaking at the right time and not pushing all season long. Also I think too much is made of it being Peacock & Sinfield's last year, yes it probably was what got us over the line at then end but our form for most of the year was because we knew with the new system you had little room to mess up with only a 4 team playoffs.

Quote: Fully "By fear factor, I mean clubs don't turn up to Headingley expecting a tonking; in fact, they turn up knowing they can give you a ruddy good game. You lost 6/11 games at home

Teams have turned up at Headingley giving us good games for several years. We haven't been tonking teams for several years at home hence the final league positions that were pointed out previously.

Quote: Fully "And in the games you won there was only 4 points in it v Hudds, 8 points v Salford, 2 points v Hull and 2 points v Wigan. Your most convincing win at home was v Saints with a gap of 12 points. Fact is that you got beat by 5 sides at home you would have been expected to win, and won by one score or less against many other teams.'"

Didn't realise we had to win by a certain margin, do we get extra bonus points if we do? Teams found it hard enough to beat the likes of Hull and Wigan and now it's not good enough that we only beat them by 2 points in a year when our confidence was very low? Considering our struggles and frequent losses we were hardly going to rack up a cricket score on teams. Note some of our losses by 1, 2 and 4. So only two times we lost heavily and fancy us to be able to turn those narrow losses into wins.

Quote: Fully "You keep trotting out this line about loss of prep time and the timeframe keeps growing. Your own physio says you lost 2 and half weeks of training time. Not a month, not over a month. A couple of weeks. It may have had an impact sure but I think you're placing too much emphasis on it. The proof will be in the pudding this year.'"

We lost 2 & half weeks AFTER training started because of the floods. But we started training about 3 weeks later than normal as I mentioned earlier.....started preseason last year on 1st Dec, this year we've started on the 7th Nov. So combined the time lost it was over a month.

Quote: Fully "As for the ageing squad, I do appreciate you have more younger members but you can't argue that your starting 17 is experienced and older.

Hall (29 later this month), Ablett (31 in Dec), McGuire (33), Burrow (34), Galloway (31), Cuthbertson (31), JJB (35), Delaney (31), Ferres (30). That's 9 all around 30, and 9 in your starting 17. Just feel like that having more older players is going to impact (more susceptible to injury) and then you're left throwing in a load of inexperienced kids again. That's why I see you mid-table. Don't think your recruitment has been anywhere near good enough.'"

How many players do Cas have that are 29 or older in their team? I'd say it's about the same. If not then how come your team was as susceptible to injuries? Or the several other teams who did? At least with our senior guys they didn't have a full preseason to get properly fit and thus probably was a cause of them then picking up knocks. Someone like JJB came back in Round 5 from a bad injury in 2015 and played every game from then on in, usually large minutes. Also 30 isn't really that old in SL anymore and Leeds have been able to get the likes of Peacock, Leuluai, Sinfield out there regularly and still performing and winning into their mid-30's so they know how to deal with older guys.