I don't think anyone is questioning his ability, its his heart that is in question. Does he have the heart/toughness in big games? In a semi-final game when your forwards are needed to step up and be counted? I don't want to turn this into a Mossop bashing, but it's obvious to see he doesn't have the heart.

The rest of your post I completely agree with.

To be fair at 23 he's still very young for a prop and in most of the big games he hasn't had much help from more experienced players backing him up. It's a tough ask for such a young player to effectively be the leader of the pack. It's also only his second season playing as an out and out prop forward if I'm not mistaken.

Chris Hill is of a similar age and has done well for Warrington but in a lot of the big games he's been backed up by good performances by Morley, Carvell and Westwood. He's part of a pack containing two of the most experienced forwards in the league.
At Wigan, Mossop is our equivalent to a Morley or Carvell really because to be honest him and Lima have been our two main forwards.

I would argue that he started the season well but suffered a loss of form and that's been his biggest issue. In his first 16 games of the year he missed just 5 tackles and then in a 6 games spell starting with the home game against Hull he missed 9. That's suggests a significant dip in form defensively.

Maybe he does lack a bit of heart in the big games but props only tend to mature later in their careers. If he's a big weak when it matters now it doesn't necessarily mean that will always be the case. It's a learning curve.

I think it goes back to the issue of having an inexperienced pack or perhaps a slightly unbalanced pack.

The rest of the team also seemed to lose form at the same time as Mossop so it could be a collective thing rather than one or two individuals letting the team down.

I think your wrong about wane , I personally think we'll be a better team for all the disappointment we've suffered this year.

And I agree with you.

No evidence - of course, he didn't take the action I would have taken so how can there be evidence that it would have worked?
No indication - oh yes there was. Murphy only being one injury away from the first team, and struggling in the semi final indicates he should have been given more game time during the year. O'Loughlin Isn't a good stand off or hooker, I think pretty much everyone accepts that. Whether Powell or L.Tomkins would have done a better job I don't know, but when Leuluai and later McIllorum were unavailable, there was no question of playing either of them, because they hadn't been given any experience. The amount of batterings we handed out and the fact that league placings don't count for much indicates Wane had ample opportunity to give the lads gametime. As for the positioning of Goulding and Gelling, many will disagree but it just made sense to me, we knew Goulding was a good winger and Gelling wasn't, and we knew Gelling's first choice position was centre. I also don't believe that not one player would have improved this season if he was a great coach, but no one did.

He's been a very poor replacement for Madge imo and i say that for a few reasons.

1- At some points it's been the 'Wane show' with some very poor and, imo, crass comments made in the press. Almost every time he's opened his mouth it's come back to bite us. It really makes you appreciate the classy and quiet way Madge went about his business.

2- He's taken our strongest area from last season, our defence, and seemly ignored it for a more attacking game plan. For me we no longer seem to shut teams out, gang tackle or really have the same level of aggression seen in previous seasons. I saw a comment on Twitter today in regards to the Storm which said great attack wins you games but great defence wins you championships! Never a more true word spoken for me.

3- Too many injuries have occurred in training and they've hurt us and our performance. Sam out from an injury picked up in training. Both Finch and Lima were ripping it up prior to picking up big injuries in training.

4- An inability to see what's going wrong. Why persist with Lockers at 6 when Tommy was injured? We had 3 games with him there and it ruined us. Why not just bring Mellor from Widnes in? He surely could have been just as good if not better than Lockers was. Lockers at 9 for the biggest game of the season? Why not start Smith there and let him play the 80mins which is something he can easily do?

5-Signings for next season have been poor. ATEOTD Wane tells IL what positions he needs players to sign in. I think Green might be ok but i dam sure know Sam would be better than him. Why not spend what was quoted as a 'considerable sum' on a different FB like Eden from Hudds and move Sam to HB?

Apart from no. 5, I agree entirely

our defence in our run of big wins april to june was incredible. since, i would agree its been sadly lacking.

I'm pretty disappointed with how we bottled the two biggest games of the season but i won't slag Wane off just yet.

Losing Leuluai hit us more than i thought it would and we didn't seem to get up to speed quick enough when he came back. Also, Micky Mac's head explosion shouldn't be forgotten - you could argue that that was the first nail in our coffin, with Sam's injury the last. As soon as it was announced he was injured i knew we wouldn't beat Leeds.

Sorry, but I can't agree with you there.

Goulding isn't a good winger, he had 1 good season in 2010, and to be quite honest I could have scored a dozen tries outside of Gleeson that year with our attack. He mis-reads plays when he's out on the wing, and whilst flying out of the line at times and making the tackle can be of use, if you miss it then 9 times out 10 you concede. I can't remember a Wigan player being as eager as he was to fly off his wing and make a play that the stand off should be defending as he often did. Granted, Gelling isn't a Pat Richards, but putting him outside of Carmont and keeping Goulding in his natural position was by far the better option IMO.

On the topic of Wane, I expected us to finish below Saints and Wire at the start of the year, so I didn't expect to win the shield. It became obvious he didn't rotate as much as he could/should have, but more experienced coaches than him (just like Tony Smith last year) have paid the price for that.

The rugby has been as good as I've seen at times this year, we didn't, under any circumstances, get our tactics wrong against Wire at home, we lost because of 2 minutes of madness by Lauaki giving them 2 penalties to win the game. I'd argue that we didn't get our tactics wrong against Leeds in the CC either - we gave them 4 tries because of errors in our own half and then were kicked to death by Sinfield and a shocking call for the try McGuire scored. Had Sam not mis-read the 40/20, and had Thaler understood the definition of a knock on, then we could have had a Wembley trip under our belts again.

As for Friday, it was a horrible way to lose, but had Murphy played 1 or 21 games this year, he'd still have dropped that ball which led to the penalty.

Wane's big test will come in 2013 as we have to go through our first perceived 'downgrade' of the squad for a few years with Tommy, Finch, Carmont and Lima leaving.

Thank gawd for this post.

A lot of the criticism about wane seems to be based on "what if" arguments. Who's to say Mellor would have been better than lockers at 6 when tommy was out, or if Logan would have done a better job at hooker since mcilorum has been out!?

And criticising next years signings before they've played is ludicrous in my opinion. We all knew the standard of imports coming in would be drastically reduced once the salary cap in Oz went up. The RFL and sky have known about it also and chose to do nothing about it, meaning we are likely to see more of our top talent going in the opposite direction, especially if further expansion teams enter the NRL.

Wane definitely isn't blameless though. We had mid season games where we were dynamite and put Leeds and saints well and truly to the sword. For whatever reason we were unable to replicate these performances in the big games that really mattered. Players that were in sparkling form earlier in the year dropped off and never got it back (Mossop, Lima, mcilorum, Goulding, finch for starters). We don't seem to have used the 2 free weekends very effectively. We seemed to lack a plan B when plan A wasn't working, and some weeks our forwards were getting dominated. Poor kicking has let us down once again, despite it looking like we'd got over that earlier in the year.