There's no point writing off the rest of the season, that's just crazy. If we get in the playoffs we have a chance of winning the Grand Final. Every club does. It might be a smaller chance than the other teams involved in there but it's still a chance. When you consider the craziness that can happen during this year a team could almost fluke it. A team could finish 4th, play a semi final against a team with 4 or 5 players missing through injury/covid reasons, win and face a team with the same problems in the final. This year we just have to win as much as possible. We failed in the cup so everything needs to go into finishing in the top 4 now.

For the rest of the season I hope Lam learns lessons from our failures. When we lose he says he doesn't know why it happened. That just isn't good enough when a lot of people watching can identify why we'd struggle before the game even starts. The number of people I've spoken to who predicted what would happen against Leeds is worrying when the coach seems oblivious.

Lam should be open to making changes. We're playing games later in the year now, the weather could be horrendous like it was yesterday and we didn't make it easier on ourselves. We should be comfortable packing the bench with forwards if we need to. Of selecting bigger players down the middle rather than 90kg back rowers. In poor conditions we might not be able to bring Bevan French into the game as much, so maybe it's worth trying him in the halves to get his hands on the ball more and have a solid fullback in Hardaker. Maybe Hastings should play more at hooker. Maybe he should be played at 13 with 2 actual props starting and 3 on the bench. Right now Lam seems adamant that things are working and puzzled when we lose. If we play the same team in the same conditions again I'd be surprised if he didn't pick the same team with the same tactics and say the same thing after a defeat.

Put simply as; if French doesn’t play well, we don’t play well. Our over reliance on one player is embarrassing for a club of our stature and recent history. How far we’ve fallen is scandalous.

We are not in with a chance of winning a GF.

I don’t believe we were before the semi and I don’t now.

You need forwards who can grind it out in the wet to min a GF. We have a pack who can play fast rugby on good tracks but it is nowhere near capable of grinding down a strong opposition pack on a heavy pitch in Autumn conditions.

There’s no guarantees it will hose it down during the play offs or the Grand Final in fairness and the pitches tend to be heavy in early season, not at the back end of the season but ultimately it matters little. I don’t think we’re good enough under Lam to win on dry nights, wet nights, bowling greens, bogs or whatever else may be thrown at us. We tactically do not look like we have a clue what we’re trying to achieve and the conditions on Saturday only magnified that. We got a couple of good results against Catalans and Hull but those teams are flaky at the best of times.

We’ve got to make the top four first and I don’t think that’s a given at all.

Look at the tries we scored in the 2010 Grand Final. That certainly wasn't 5 drives and a kick stuff. I think we're physically capable of beating anyone in the league on our day bar maybe Saints. Even in those conditions, if we had our best playkicker on the field and weren't down to two subs early (one of which being a halfback) we would have stood a better chance. We were also facing a team playing a pretty flawless game, which won't usually happen.

The bigger concern for me is that we aren't finding a way to peak for these big knockout games the way we did under Maguire and to a lesser extent Wane. I don't know if that's psychological, physical or tactical, and I bloody hope Lam is just saying he doesn't know to the media.

I firmly believe he doesn’t know. One thing we had under Wane was honesty in every interview, perhaps ironically too honest. There’s not a chance Wane stands there at the end of a mullering and say “I don’t know what went wrong”. There’s not a chance any coach worth his/her salt says that.

This very much feels like our ‘Cunningham’ moment where we have to be brutal and do what’s best for the club and forget about personal allegiances. Adrian Lam IMO will always be a club legend as a player but will easily be forgotten about as coach.