I didn't expect us to win a GF this year. It was obvious that our squad lacked enough depth and quality in the back row and the centres before a ball was kicked, and I said so at the start of the year. Before the season I'd have said we needed to get into the top 4/5 to show the Powell project was progressing.

Clearly that's where we are now. But the direction of travel is as important as the final league position. If we scrape along to a top half finish winning 40% of games from here on in, that will look like a success but the start we had is going to mask over a lot of issues. We can choose to recognise that or ignore it

Similar to what browny said, at the moment we seem (to me at least) to be in the early stages of slipping, a la 2019 after we won the cup, and for most ppl thats where our most recent malaise began.

Yes first half this year has been a massive improvement over last year, but if drop like a ing stone for the rest of this season, that's a huuuge problem for powell

I'm in that space too. We're higher up the ladder than most people expected. If we'd had 4 from 8 at the start, I don't think we'd be expecting to go 7 unbeaten, so we'd have ended up lower down the ladder.

We really do need to win the next three (against 10th, 11th and 8th) to show that the first 7 weren't a fluke.

rl18 matches for 'former' wire aussie starrl

LOL if Serious About RL actually researched their stories they would know it’s a different Tyrone Roberts.

Maybe they would change their name to "Sloppy Careless Reporting About RL"

Bunch of clowns

https://www.rugby-league.com/article/61 ... %7C-june-6

https://www.rugby-league.com/article/61 ... %7C-june-6

Hate to bring it back to the Knowles incident, but 12 matches for words and nothing for a deliberate attempt to injure a fellow professional is a joke. I know the whole "inclusivity" thing is in vogue nowadays but this is silly. However, he should have learnt his lesson but decided not to

Inclusivity is in vogue?


Did you really just write that?

I was trying to write a response and gave up.

Just read that tribunal thing, and to put the top hat on it, Walmsley was found not guilty of a high tackle, so the mouth breathers in WA9 will be in ecstasy

Saints must have had compelling evidence. Had they have lost the appeal and it be deemed frivolous, they would have lost Walmsley for the Wigan fixture. I don't think they would have risked that for a £250 fine. If it was for the incident I think it was, it was a head clash, commented on at the time by the clowns, sorry commentary team, on Sky. It seems at the moment the review panel are leaving themselves open to appeals. The McDonnell ban and appeal shows that they just took the word of the touch judges decision on the field as gospel, It would appear as a result of Leeds appeal, that despite all the video angles, they couldn't find the evidence of that. I presume the touch judge must have back tracked as they allowed the appeal. How many times has this happened and a club hasn't appealed for fear of the appeal being deemed frivolous and losing a player for an extra game with an important fixture at stake.

First of all it wasn't a deliberate attempt to injure someone,how many tackles have we seen since then that are exactly the same but the player has had a lesser ban ? As for the 12 games,IF it's true what he said and who it was said about then he's an idiot and deserves what he gets. There is winding players up and it happens in every game,then there is crossing a line and it seems he has crossed that line again.

Didn't all the QCs become KCs a short while back? Not a big deal I know, but the MRP (or ORT in this case) might want to get something right every now and again?

Saints are very professional with the appeals. It's always based on something. The Knowles incident before the Grand Final for example, they got an independent medical expert to prove that he didn't move the arm beyond the natural range of motion, so therefore it couldn't have been putting an undue risk of injury on the player, which was the rationale used for the grading.

With the Walmsley one, the MRP put 'high tackle, player attempts tackle, but is reckless about the outcome'. What happened was Greenwood runs the ball in hard, his head hits Roby's in a headclash (Who interestingly wasn't cited) and bounced off like a deflected shot in football and hits Walmsley's head. It was a bizarre charge in the first place and another that has happened due to this ridiculous mantra of banning players if an injury occurs. They've presumably charged Walmsley and not Roby as they think the injury came from his head hitting Walmsley's. If you pause it when the initial contact occurs, Walmsley's head is nowhere near Greenwood's, so how can it be reckless? It's just unfortunate.

McDonnell is either really lucky, in that the video doesn't pick up a punch that happened, or really unlucky in that the touch judge sees a motion and interprets that as a punch when it in fact wasn't. Again, the panel have used the injury to Lomax as part of the rationale for the charge along with the testimony of the touch judge. Once Leeds proved he already had a mark on his face before it, they reversed the ban. Again, strange as Lomax's shirt was clean before it, and looked like Terry Butcher after it. In reality the MRP should never have charged him, if they can see there was no punch, or back the touch judge and ban him anyway despite the lack of video proof. Sending off sufficient and no record on his disciplinary rap sheet would have been the correct outcome for me. That way you're not dismissing the touch judge's opinion.

The MRP are just going too far in re-refereeing games for me. They're looking for reasons to ban players. We need to move to a system similar to football's, in that they trust the officials and don't re-referee the entire game frame by frame looking for any hint of a possible foul or injury. They way they do it now is also biased against the teams who are televised. There are far more charges brought from the televised games vs the non-televised games as there is better footage and more camera angles. That can't be right.