I think Wigan showed us how to win when staring down the barrel of a gun. It's called a winning mentality. Saints have it in bucket loads too.

Smith more or less said we started playing differently when wigan went a man down,he's the coach he should have got off his and sorted it out rather than waiting till the games over.

I guess you're not old enough to remember a chap called Briers, used to play for you...?

For yesterday alone, you're right. But, how many times have you men lost a major final against quality opposition under Smith? Every one? That speaks to the mentality coached into the side and that is Smith's responsibility.

Does beating Leeds in two finals not count then?

Geoff,there's a difference between questioning decisions and telling the officials to f off every week.

Actually those 2 games are prime examples. Warrington started the games and were the better team and then won comfortably. But when the other team is able to match warrington and show they can cause problems, or it's a relatively close game, warrington lose. Even some times warrington have squandered positions when they should have closed out an easy win.

That's the point, under Smith warrington will only win the trophy on the line games if they rack up a lead and the opposition is easily second best. Even simply racking up a lead has proven to not be sufficient because when the opposition have some fight warrington can't close it out.

Leeds have literally won 6 grand finals when it was knip and tuck right up until the last 10. You need to be able to do this to post titles. Warrington have consistently shown under smith an inability to do this and thus, zero titles.

It is not every player, Hill was an absolute tower of strength out there yet again.

We really missed the heart of Ben Westwood out there to back him up.

To be fair Flex ,the Leeds final at OT was disrupted by Ryan Bailey starting a fight that took our eye off the ball when we could have possibly scored & gone on to win. IIRC Leeds capitalised & scored at the other end !
I do get your gist though about a common thread.

The bailey incident was with a minute to go, game was gone. If you look at smith's success and failures you see a common trend. Put a tony smith team in the sutuation leeds were, in the last 15 mins of the grand final last year 2 points ahead, and what would have happened? at 22-20 leeds killed the game dead, kicking to touch in the croner, not even going for 2 points in order to maintain absolute field position dominance. A tony smith team would have been throwing mental cut out passes 30 meters from their line into touch, to try and score the dazzling try.

I couldn't agree more. We can't seem to play basic,sensible rugby.

Funny thing, I can't remember much about that grand final, I can remember all the challenge cups,the 13 final but the twelve, not much

This lack of ability to win big tight games was in evidence back against Leeds in the semi in 2011. We are great if we blow teams away by half time. We are a different story when it's close. Game management and composure under pressure.

Unfortunately,on Friday we didn't have the manpower to play a tight game up the middle which doesn't fit with our style anyway. What was noticeable though was when Wigan played us at our own expansive game we were worryingly overwhelmed.

Prime examples or not, I was referring to the quote which wrongly claimed that we hadn't beaten quality opposition in a final. Leeds were a quality side both years we beat them at Wembley and the fact we blew them away had as much to do with Tony Smith as our collapse on Friday night did.

If we're to analyse Smith's time here and discuss his failings, lets at least keep it valid and not devalue our achievements under him by saying we've not beaten quality opposition.