Hello folks
Long time forum browser but not a leigh fan....in fact not a fan of any particular team.
The game has moved on since i was more involved........
In those days you got three guarantees with Leigh:
1 - at some stage in the game, Timmy Street would have a fight
2 - Norman Turley would score a drop goal
3 - half time pie would be at least 8 out of 10!
So having watched the game yesterday, i joined this forum especially to give a huge wrap to the Leigh players yesterday.
They demonstrated that heart and unity in a team game can carry you such a long way.
Personally i am not in favour of the Canadian "expansion" for several reasons:
How is it "toronto" when almost all of the players are from Lancashire,Yorkshire or Australia?
Is it still expansion if many of the very foundation clubs of your game are left to go to the wall,while the horizons are "expanded"?
If money fails to buy success...how many seasons will Mr Argyle hang around?
And a whole range of other reasons.......but
It is what it is and all i find myself doing now is deriving great pleasure in seeing that team look like exactly what it is....a bunch of blokes thrown together in a shared pursuit of fat wage packets.
From sundays game from a Leigh point of view
I thought that those guys actually looked as though playing for Leigh really mattered to them
Unlike some, i actually thought that Ridyard was superb at fullback, perhaps not quite properly covered by his wingers at times....but safe as houses and calm and composed (everything that as a player, you want your full back to be.
I thought that the pair of half backs did pretty well, although i do have a slight issue with Danny Richardsons tendency to look for the "hollywood" play too often.
The great players all do the simple things well first and foremost
At times on sunday Danny was trying to arrange a killer tackle 5 play, whilst the tackle count was at 1 or 2....resulting in 3 wasted "set up" drives
Josh woods looks a handy scrum half who would thrive with a more experienced half back partner but i agree with the comments that he needs to mix up his running game a bit.
Leigh's biggest difficulty was that once you looked wider than 7 and 6...there existed very little threat to toronto defenders....the centres and wingers posed very little in the way of attacking menace.
Unfortunately this happens to be toronto's strong point
For my money,Chase Stanley is the best defensive centre outside of super league and with Leutele they are more than equal to most teams in that area of the pitch.
Fortunately for other teams, the quality of the Toronto wingers and half backs does not match that of their centres.
Rawsthorne is bang average and higson decent but far from super league class
In the halves josh mcCrone is toilet..he is slow,small,a poor tackler and a penalty machine to boot
Blake Wallace is a lively runner with ball in hand but offers no organisational skills - the very thing a half back should have.
I thought that quite simply the Toronto forwards were smarter at slowing the ruck when they needed to.
Ashton Sims and Gadwin Springer should have both been penalised on multiple ocassions for lying on and messing around. Instead though it was young Adamson for Leigh singled out by the ref as the worst offender
All in all much to be mighty proud of for your lads and it may just be that the exit of some so called "stars" actually kick starts some good things for Leigh
Best of luck for the rest of the season
