Wondering how many games kicking could cost us this season unless it improves gradually

Correct. He keeps his nerve and doesn't bottle it. Same as the drop goal under immense pressure - yet he delivered. You know there were times last season when Pat's kicking was well below 80%.

Plus he's not letting his misses get to his general play either.

Please don't try and blame yesterday's loss on Smith's goal kicking. Yesterday's loss was down to: Ill-discipline, ridiculous handling errors and awful edge defence.

Get Hampshire kicking, he converted a lot at the Leeds u19 grand final and going off what I've heard he was doing this all season in the under 19s.

We took Richards for granted in the kicking department, you were classing every try as 6 points before he'd even set up for the kick.

If natty carries on missing it's gonna cost us big at some point, yeh only 3 games in but we with a good kicker we would have took the points home yesterday and not lost in the last 30 seconds by 5 points.

How do you know Pat would have kicked those yesterday? He did have his off days you know. I might agree with you if Matty had been missing shockers but I reckon only one of those yesterday would you class as reasonably easy (I think it was at 16-14). Most of Wigan's tries are scored out wide and it's always hit and miss with conversions from the touchline, especially the right with a right footed kicker. Matty has shown enough bottle to be given a chance.

Why burden Hampshire with all that expectation so early in his career?

This will be the first time a lot of people on here will have known Wigan without a top class goalkicker. We just lost Pat who came in 2006, Farrell left end of 2005 and prior to him we had Frano from 1990.
That's 24 seasons with some of the best kickers this club's ever had.
Getting a top quality player who is equaly as good at goal kicking is far from easy as there are so few around.
Yes we want an 80% goal kicker of course we do. If it was as simple as that we'd have signed Foster from Bradford some time ago. Trouble is as a player he is no where near the calibre we have in the positions he plays.
It may take some time to find one in the mean time some poor sod has to take on the responsibilty and the flak that comes with it when they fall short of Pat's, Faz's and Botica's standard.
If you just look at the stats of the game we lost on goal kicks. For anyone who was there perhaps like me it seemed a bit different at the time.
We can blame Smith, the ref was mediocre at best and other reasons in the blame game.
We still let in two tries when Cas were down to 12 men. That first 15 mins we just couldn't defend our try line. Away from home you will always be vulnerable to a large penalty count, we were and invited it. Some of our handling was poor, how many crash balls this year have we dropped. The Green/Farrell crash ball was dropped, Cas got possession, gained a penalty then scored a try which was six points. How many times that move was tried, failed and the ball ended on the floor I can't remember?
You'd honestly think Cas had looked at video's of Wigan to notice that move.
These terrible opposition teams do cheat don't they?????????
We played poorly, and Cas played better and won.
Things are not too bad though. As poor as we were we outscored Cas in tries right to the end when they equalled us. We have surely two of the fastest wingmen in SL who do and will score lots of tries.
This team will get better, leadership will get better, handling will improve and the wins will come. The players are certainly good enough if they play well.
Goal kicking is a problem, we lost yesterday though through playing poorly.

So we would have won, if another/the kicker had had a 100% record... Stretching it a bit...

The team played, badly cas played well.. End of.

Really was a tremendous droppie, really haven't seen many as good under so much pressure

Just give him some time. Smith has a cool head and will grow into this role, he is in a period of adjusting to the responsibility. When the pressure was seriously on, he came up with the goods from the touchline on Sunday, this for me shows that he has the temperament to handle the pressure of being our regular kicker.

The likes of Sinfield, Brough and Walsh have not always been the best kickers around. Even Pat struggled at first but as players start to practice more and take on the responsibility they will improve. Smith will be doing plenty of practice after training and every kick he takes will give him additional experience.

I agree it will cause a major problem in some games we don't have an 80% plus goal-kicker but I'm pretty confident Smith will adjust to the role.

We have been spoilt with freakish goal-kickers in the past, lets not get on his back after a few games.

Perhaps its time to try the option of drop kicking a conversion or two, a new rule that has, up to now, AFAIK, only been used once (Leeds I think) in Super League. Can't be much worse

It was a new rule brought for the 2013 season as far as i am aware it is still in place.

I don't remember Pat Richards landing anything remotely difficult for at least 6-8 games the season he started kicking.