This.....in spades; zero credit & let's bang on about last season instead!

Re the Watkins 8 point try. I know it's harsh and Watkins didn't intentionally attack dufty's head but we all know the rule for a few years now that any contact with the head intentional or not is a penalty.

Agree with this but to be fair Wilkin rightly highlighted what a big play Thewlis pulled off to pass to Dufty and get us out of trouble. A play that, in live commentary, warranted an 'oh no' and lots of tutting from Pyke and Amor.

And on that, wasn't it great to see both of our young wingers come up with big plays to affect the game in the second half? Especially against two very good opponents in Sio and Burgess. I thought the Ashton run in the build-up to the Thewlis try was magnificent play and the sort of stuff very few players are able to.

A few thoughts. I have no doubt that the ref had had enough by the point he binned Brierly but I didn’t see him give a team warning. Is that still a “thing” or have we moved on? Or did he give a warning and I didn’t see it?
I don’t recall us or indeed anyone else scoring 3 tries during a binning, usually we are happy with just one. (Think about 1st match last season v Leeds where we needed 2 players off to scrape a win).
Ashton’s finish was phenomenal and he is starting to look a very good player who is not just reliant on pace, his pass to Williams leading to the kick to Thewlis was a peach.
Ben Currie’s tackling in the first half was absolutely woeful…but he wasn’t the only one.
While I’m not a massive Peter M fan I prefer him at centre to Minikin hopefully we get some bodies back soon.
Harrison clearly needs his injury sorted out.
The partnership between Williams and Drinkwater looks like it will be the real deal where they complement each other, I can’t remember the last time we had such a partnership.
I am sure we will have much tougher tests but we will also have some important players coming in who have yet to feature. If Vaughan and Maguire are ever on the pitch at the same time it should be mayhem (hopefully in the opposition’s ranks).

Interesting comments about the 'pro Salford' comments of the commentators.

I found it cringeworthy that the pre match interviewing was so 'pro Warrington'. The impression I got was that they thought Warrington only had to get on the field to win - which was always going to be far from the truth.

I'll watch it again, but as I said earlier on I think Salford can feel hard done by.

Regarding the lying on and holding down, I didn't see much difference between that match and many of the others and if Brierley was sin binned because the ref had had enough, I didn't see the usual 'team warning'. Maybe he'd verbally told them without the usual sign.

We got back in the game by doing the basics, being patient and building pressure. We stopped them going out wide as often (where their free flowing ball movement caused us problems all night) and once the momentum swung they couldn't get it back and - in my view - that was aided by some of the refs decisions.

I appreciate it's probably a minority view on here, but that's all part of the fun of the forum.

RIghtly said though the '22 Wire wouldn't have done what the '23 Wire did.
Confidence and self belief is a big thing at top level sport.

That really was the "game of two halves". The first 40 minutes could not have been more different from the second, where defensively we were all over the place, and then totally dominant. There's work to do to iron out the issues of the first half, but pleasing that we didn't collapse and end up conceding 40 or 50 points. There'll be no way back if we go in 14 points down at half time against other teams. The signs are positive, given our first three performances are so much better than the first three of 2022.

I wonder if Clark got the hairdryer at half time; it was a completely different bloke who emerged in the 2nd half.

Amor seems to have a huge chip on his shoulder and I certainly picked up on how anti-Wire his commentary was. I try to zone out when Pyke is talking, simply because his voice sounds like he is permanently chewing a Toffo, and it really gets on my nerves.

Yes, I know we have to embrace this all inclusive society nowadays, but it does seem odd that Sky choose to have a fella with a speech impediment doing commentary for them. ... you then throw JJB into the mix and it really does become a real task to take it seriously

team warnings (big circle gesture) were done away with a few years ago, i dont know if it was the season of, or when they made the change to 6 agains during covid, they had had a few 6 agains and were clearly struggling when we were getting on top of them, so it was an accumulation issue, even if the straw that broke the camel's back was soft(ish).

But based on salford having pretty naff second half performances in both games so far, this does appear to be a trend, and people blaming the ref (how many forward passes were let go in the first half?) are an easy cop out after a collapse.

Again, we saw last night, sneyd is a great halfback for controlling the game, and kicking goals when you're ahead. he's not getting you back into the game or changing the momentum for you.

That miss was a major confidence killer for them.

tell you whats interesting about this, most people will have a complaint about sky being 'pro' whoever.

thats got to be a good thing, because for years everyone has complained about sky focusing on the negatives, banging on about mistakes and poor play rather than selling the positives.

I'm alright with that, salford's backs do play some great stuff, lafai is almost impossible to stop, say what you want about minikin, bateman would have struggled against him.

I'm happy for them to try and sell the game better, hoistically.

stuart pyke is pretty rotten as a commentator though, i also got sick of amor saying 'pykey' every time.

In the interests of saving The Speculator from a potential libel action, other tooth-filling loosening, tongue tying confectionery is available.

Really encouraged by the second half performance as many have said that game last year would have gone away from us. Whilst his defence might be questioned (by others on here) I'm starting to believe that the Drinkwater/Williams HB partnership might turn out to be as effective as we'd hoped.

I had Ashton as MOM he had a great game.

On a slightly negative note, I wonder what happened to the 'missing' 1500?

.

Yes, Matty Ashton has really caught the eye in all three games so far. He's getting through loads of work and has been very solid. I've no qualms about Williams getting MOM last night (despite his couple of poor passes out to the left), but Ashton and Mikaele (Amor, please note, it's Mikaele, NOT Mikalaele!!) were certainly close behind.

Surely 'pykey' is offensive and warrants an 8 game commentary box ban?

I think Amor is a really poor pundit/co-commentator