Too many experienced players and not enough youth in the team ..... interesting take on it.

So, we should've played Dwyer at hooker, Riley (G) at prop, Currie at 2nd row, GOB in the halfs, Evans on the wing etc etc - all of whom have played, and played well, in the last couple of seasons, and will feature more and more over the next few....... and we'd of course be sat here with the same people saying "What was Smith doing? Dropping the players who got him to the final and bringing in all those inexperienced youngsters".

Maybe the younger players wouldn't have sustained injuries or tired at the end of the game ... but would they have prevented Wigan from scoring early on? And would they have exploited gaps in the Wigan defence and gotten Wire 16-2 up in the first place? I doubt it.

Bottom line (now my heads cleared and I've watched the game a couple of times) - Those 'oldies' got us 16-2 up with nearly half the game played. A combination of injuries (from whatever cause) and fatigue forced Wire to shuffle players into unaccustomed positions, which caused enough confusion in the ranks for Wigan to take advantage, and they turned the scoreline around, winning the game.

As a coach I'd ask one thing and one thing only - every player gives 100% during their time on the pitch. I can't think of one Wire player that didn't ........

By the way, the stats are not made up by me, they collected by independent observers. As opposed to random outbursts about boybands...!! Speaking of which, presumably according to your logic Finch and Lima in the past and all the Wigan players who had been publicly expressing how important Lockers was to the team in the run up to the GF (Tomkins gave an interview in which he said Lockers was the best player at Wigan) are like 1D fan obsessives?

You even seem to object to the use of the nickname "Lockers". It's used by lots of people connected with the club, including our coach.

Oh dear...

Agreed, Smith played very well and if I'm allowed to say this without being accused of "sickening adulation" ( ) Green's performance was fantastic. He thoroughly deserved the Harry Sunderland trophy.

To be fair to Briers and Myler though, they were playing behind a beaten pack and they just didn't get enough ball close to Wigan's line.

I wasn't that confident (!) but felt we had a chance - I was confident that the longer the game went on the stronger we would be, but a 14 point lead was a big margin!

From a Wire point of view, I'd say O'Loughlin is a very good player and probably the one type of player we actually lack at the club, who would make us a significantly better side - He reminds me of Mike Gregory, a player who did a lot of things very well, but, to the casual observer, wasn't particularly eye-catching because he never did the flair things like a Ellery Hanley could.... Importantly, both Gregory and O'Loughlin were/are great leaders, who are both greatly admired and appreciated by the most important people, and that's their team mates.

Personally, I'd take O'Loughlin in a heartbeat - He'd offer so much more than the present Wire set up of basically having an extra prop at loose forward, and would also take a lot of pressure of our half backs.

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