I seem to recall watching a dvd / documentary on this subject some time ago, a lot of northern clubs do this on a regular basis

Disappointing, depressing even at times. Don't think poor results were down to a lack of effort - more to do with a lack of real size and quality in the pack and a lack of direction/confidence. Crowd figures are desperate and I fear it'll take more than a moderately successful side to boost them. I'd go for regular Friday night football. It may not be good for the away fans but the Stoop has a good buzz about it on a Friday night which may help to attract the type of fan who attends for the beer and the craic rather than the rugby itself.

Positives, as said by others;
We appear to still be in business despite rumours to the contrary only a week or two ago.
Young Londoners breaking through - I know some on here don't rate all of them but the fact they are coming through in numbers can only be a good thing. Importing the bulk of your players from the North/Down Under is not sustainable despite the short term gains.
Ellis and Randall are as good as any club has at no' 9
It's the off-season (for us at least) so we can dream for a while about some star signings!

If a picture can paint a thousand words.........

The main thing is results. These were the worst in my nine seasons of regular support.

Positives? We attempted to play entertaining rugby and at times we had as many as 16 Englishmen in our 17 man squad. But these are only really positives if you believe we couldn't have achieved better results by adopting a different approach. Crusaders threw their squad together well after everyone else had done the bulk of their recruitment, found loads of unheralded Aussies who were available (I believe they had dispensation to recruit more than the rest of us), yet still won nearly twice as many matches as us and made the play-offs.

I only saw eleven matches this season, my lowest since 2001, because I was disillusioned with what I was seeing. We won two of these and lost nine. The home wins against Castleford and Crusaders were exciting high scoring matches and the defeat at Saints was a valiant performance in a match we might have won with fewer individual errors at crucial moments; the other eight games were all lost without ever really looking likely to win. We were repeatedly outplayed and outfought. Watching the Warrington game with a friend who supports the opposition, and to my knowledge hasn't missed a game home or away all season, he turned to me during the first half and almost in disbelief asked if our defence was always so poor. I had to tell him it was the norm.

Losing is one thing if there's hope that the situation will improve. Other than David Hughes pledging to pay the bills for another season I'm not convinced there is any long term trend towards improvement on the field. Trying to be optimistic, we're guaranteed a new coach for next year so there must be a chance that, whoever he is, he can rejuvenate the squad and raise the level of performance on the field.

To sum it up in two words [size"Annus Horribilus"[/size

and we have been too weak defensively, especially on the right. O'Callaghan and Clubb have been a revolving door all season.

I can’t understand why Mac didn’t coach Clubb to stay in the line in defence-I would expect low grade players to understand the benefits of a straight line defence rather than making the decision for the attacker which Clubb does week after week.

Off Topic I apologise-but this has really annoyed me all season-as well as contributing to my thoughts that Mac isn’t an intelligent coach

Quote: morethanenuff "and we have been too weak defensively, especially on the right. O'Callaghan and Clubb have been a revolving door all season.'" I would be very interested to see an opposition try graphic showing where tries were scored against us in 2010. I would imagine most would be around the right centre position. JOC's first full season in first-grade, and he has been outside someone who in 2010 could not be relied on defensively. I think defending outside Tony Clubb, who IS a second-row or possibly even a prop the way we need front-rowers, would be like running on chip batter, whilst trying to keep out cohesive attacks from co-ordinated teams. www.dailymotion.com/video/xekvn5 ... e-one_tech Tony Clubb get back to the pack!

Quote: morethanenuff "and we have been too weak defensively, especially on the right. O'Callaghan and Clubb have been a revolving door all season.'" I would be very interested to see an opposition try graphic showing where tries were scored against us in 2010. I would imagine most would be around the right centre position. JOC's first full season in first-grade, and he has been outside someone who in 2010 could not be relied on defensively. I think defending outside Tony Clubb, who IS a second-row or possibly even a prop the way we need front-rowers, would be like running on chip batter, whilst trying to keep out cohesive attacks from co-ordinated teams. www.dailymotion.com/video/xekvn5 ... e-one_tech Tony Clubb get back to the pack!

Interesting view on the season Joeo

He seems to be a "glass half full" person!

Two questions

1) What drugs are you on?
and

2) Can I have some please?

That's great joeo. At least somebody got something positive from this season.

For me, it's all about performance on the pitch and a home record of
P13, W4, L9, conceding more than 25 points per game is just too bad.

I don't get to so many games these days, "my" home record is 1 win in 7 and my remembered "high spot" of the one victory is of seeing Howell wind up McGoldrick so much that he conceded a penalty in possession, which I think proved a turning point in the game, and led to the tattoo-ed one getting his marching orders. We threw away the Salford game (oh, that we had a Holdsworth to organise us), were embarrassingly bad in the 2 Hull games and were totally outclassed by Saints, Leeds and Wigan.

The Salford game was the nadir. Staggering ineptitude on display. Salford fans came down at half time and said to me "Christ you lot are awful"