Had a look at the results over 13 years of play off results, and I was surprised at the stats:

Saints 19 wins 11 losses
Wigan 18/11
Bradford 14/9
Leeds 14/14
Catalan 3/2
Hull 3/8
Cas 2/4
Warrington 1/4
Wakefield 1/2

No-one else has won a play-off game.

Unfortunately we have only converted this to 1 GF win, but this enforces the fact that we are generally fearsome in play off football. A top 4 slot is essential and would surely see us as serious contenders.

As a Saints fan I hate to agree with you but you are right there

We haven't converted into enough Grand Final wins but we've constantly not had a good enough regular season to do that.

Why have Saints won 4 Grand Finals? Because they have consitently had good regular seasons. Same for Leeds in recent years and Bradford when they had their good run earlier in the decade.

The regular season sets up your play off push. Brian Noble never grasped that in his time at week. It was even more important last season with the new format. I think in hindsight now both Leeds and Saints would have been relieved to avoid us in Week 1 of the play offs. I firmly believe have we finished top 4 we would have made the Grand Final ahead of Saints.

Failure to convert is what cost Brian Noble his job.

The league is not a strong one so basically winning a few play offs in games that do not count for the big one is a sign of mediocrity, we must kick on from this, under the new man, the same counts for Challenge Cup games we have to convert the big ones.

I think that is enough proof to say that league positions have let us down big time. Had we won at saints we would have the best play-off record, only 1 game in it.

We have always had too much to do come the play-offs, the last 3 years we have just run out of steam at the final hurdle. It's hard to think we could of been in the last 3 grand finals because on the field our team does not look that good.

Hopefully next season under new coaches we can get into the top 4 and win our first game, that would really set us up to get to old trafford.

Yeah but how many times have we played teams finishing 4th/5th/6th/7th in the playoffs compared to Saints who always play teams finsihing 1st/2nd/3rd?

Stats can dress anything up to look good. Thats why the playoffs are nonsense, The team finshing top is the best team, the team finishing 5th/6th/7th/8th can't possibly be the best can they????????????????

Our defeats have pretty much all come in the 'big' game of either the semi final or the final.

We've tended to win all the lesser play off games but have really struggled when it's come to the crunch.

Take also into consideration that we have played a few less play-off series than a couple of other teams.

We just lose the big games!

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How many fnals have you been to in the last 5 seasons ?

They're the BIG games!

Ok they are bigger than semi finals but to say semi finals are not big is just stupid IMO.

We've been saying for a while that our play-off performances have flattered to deceive. We've done well in the play-offs; there's no doubt about that. But we've always had to go a bridge too far because this form was absent earlier in the season. Thus when the big jobs needed to be done, we were too drained.

Surely there can't be any argument now that early-season form is vital? In recent years we've spent far too much time early and mid-season farting around at the lower end of the table, leaving ourselves a mountain to climb as the business end approached.

This is something the new guy can hopefully put right. I sincerely hope that we never again hear this nonsense about "it's not how we play now that matters, but how we play in August and September". To me that was nothing more than blatant excuse-making, and it amazes me that some fans actually seemed to buy into it.

Another thing MM should concentrate on is our mental resiliance. No SL team should go into a fixture thinking "we're definitely going to lose today - it's a foregone conclusion", but that's what happened with Wigan during numerous trips to Knowsley Road, Cardiff, etc. Likewise, no team should go into a CC semi-final thinking "we'll win this easily because the opposition is pants", but that's what Wigan did against both Catalan and Warrington. If the opposition genuinly is pants, you should muller them. If they're pants but trying hard, you should still have enough to beat them. If they're good, you should give them a very hard game. If they're excellent, you should try your damndest and, at the worst, give them a real scare. That's the way Wigan always used to do it, because their head was nearly always in the right place. Hopefully MM can reintroduce this thought process, because under Nobby it was sadly lacking.

Couldnt put it better myself, this goes for every Professional sports team, the great teams that are 30-0 up at half time will go on to win 60-0, not 30-28 for example. we need to put the boot in, hopefully under Mr Mcguire we can do this