Agreed.

was speaking to a couple of leeds fans on the way home on friday and they also reckoned he had a shocker

yes , there was a couple of knock ons, how many of those had a bit of help from a leeds hand ?

yes he gave away a penalty or two , thats what happens when you are involved in the thick of it , he didint hide the way ryan bailey did for example

as has allready been eluded to , 30 + tackles and almost 100 mtrs gained will do me every week

i call that a decent shift

Ok ok maybe stinker was slightly harsh. I couldn't make the game on Friday because I was at my dad's 50th birthday party so had to make do with watching the extended highlights on Sky, which probably makes his errors more glaring and doesn't really show his defensive work. Still not justifying his big fat pay-cheque though

What he *is* justifying is his place in the team.

The pay-cheque is irrelevant - That's down to whatever Maurice was willing to throw in his direction to get him to switch to us from Bradford.

OK, so he had a bad game error-wise (although as was already mentioned, he was "helped" to knock-on a couple of times).

He is working hard for the team (as is everyone else), and I would have him as my first-choice prop every week based on current form.

That says to me that he is worth keeping beyond this year, although the terms will have to be IFL-terms, rather than Mo-terms.

Lets be honest Ganson made an example of him, if the ref is against you there isnt much you can do. At least half the things he got penalised for were wrong and he did well not to lose his cool completley and get binned/sent off. He put his body on the line and threw himself into every tackle and with a better ref he would of been a contender for MOM imo.

He is awesome in defence, top player, he doesn't have th go forward he used to but he consistantly gets a good 8m often attracting players.

He needs to cut the errors though and stop moaning at the ref when the call goes against him. That extra 10m he gave away against leeds could the the difference in another game.

I am quite happy to see all other fans thinking its the same old Fielden, on the VT people are saying all our players bar 3 are very average, does this really matter?

Yes i think he did, I have been very impressed with him this year but the basic errors he made on Friday were very very poor. His carry was shocking and he lost concentration at the most simple of moments resulting in dropped ball and penalties.

I have been hugely impressed with his form this year but the simplistic nature of the repeated errors on Friday for me outweighed the other stats.

If he were to come up with a performance like that in a major semi final or play off I am sure the result of those errors would have been more costly than it was against a Leeds side who are struggling a little for form at the moment, especially in attack.

Stuart Fielden has been in excellent form this season, so far and like many of our squad looks to be a different player to previous seasons.
Leeds seem to target Fielden whenever we play them. They are constantly interfering at the play of the ball, which happened again on friday night, resulting in Fielden being judged to have lost the ball or not played it correctly. Mostly they get away with it because it's something the have almost perfected.
Stuart needs to be aware of this when playing Leeds and try to protect the ball more in the tackle.
I'm sure he'll be ready for Saints come Friday and here's hoping he has a stormer!

I thought although he did cost a couple of penalties and 3-4 knock on's, his workrate in defensive was immense and his go forward has improved.

I think the last 'knock on' with the Leeds player under him was a joke, i think his reputation went before him on that, and i think that was mentioned on the commentary.

I would ask the people who weren't impressed with Fielden's performance, would you have swapped him for Ryan Bailey? He played 80 mins at prop and made two impacts on the game, having a stupid haircut and a high shot on Fielden.

This is when Leeds are having a injury crisis and would have been looking at more senior players to step up to the mark in the absence of Peacock, Kylie Leuluai. He was awful, zero presence.

I can forgive a few errors if he puts the hard work in defence, and i remember on one occasion him, forcing the error to win back posession after knocking on.

I'd certainly have him over Bailey, who offered nothing for Leeds.

Well said, the hit was where Stu drove his shoulder hard into JJB at waist level and lockers was behind JJB, ball lost, knock on, Wigan scrum.

No, not as bad as some are making out and he was unlucky with a couple of calls too. However, he does make these errors consistently and really needs to start concentrating on holding the ball better after a drive. He seems to switch off a little too often and nearly always puts the ball down before he's properly regained his feet. More specifically, he is often unbalanced as he is in the act of putting the ball down. This is something he could remedy quite easily but he really needs to do it immediately before it does cost us.

I have to make the comparison with O'Loughlin here, who gets through inordinate amounts of work week in, week out, yet is fantastic in attack and, given the amount of defence he does, relatively error free. Mind you, the man is a machine!

Take away the errors for a moment, and tell me how the rest of his game was. I personally thought it was excellent, and I expect that's what Maguire and Wane thought to.

I really fail to see how the errors can outweigh the rest of the performance, unless somebody who didn't make the errors but didn't put in the same level of the rest of performance equally had 'a stinker'

Would our coaches be happy with the errors? of course not
Would stu be happy with the errors? probably less happy than anybody else in the world about them

Thankfully I think they're reasonable enough (Maguire was smiling about it on the red button bit), just to work on them during training this week, and not be as ridiculous as a few fans in thinking he should be dropped because of them.

Some people are being very quick to throw around the word 'form' and then suggest a player should be dropped after 1 non optimal (but still overall positive contribution) performance. Form isn't something that's assessed over 1 match, when Maguire said he'd select on form does anybody really think he was meaning 'make a few mistakes in 1 game and you're out?' Ricky Stuart at Cronulla seemingly has the entire team scared witless of making any errors, and it seems to be making the players perform worse not better.

He was poor on Friday, but he's been good this season. I don't care if you're a tackling machine, you can't turn the ball over 5 times and have a good game.