So you don’t want to start an argument but you’ve decided to bring an old post up from a couple of months ago to ask a question that you already know the answer to?

Not sure how my posts of late and “my falling off a cliff” comment isn’t conclusive proof that my opinion has changed.

And once again in the main I’ve listed players missing because you seemed to think that we are at full strength now because the players listed in my original post were now back.

In the interests of not boring everyone else and entering into another argument that’s my last comment on it

Great. I'll make my last comment too then. No, I didn't know the answer to it as you have repeatedly (and still are) using missing players as mitigation. You may well have posted about falling off a cliff but so were many Wigan fans a few weeks ago. It didn't, and doesn't, mean that we think we have no chance once French and others were back. My question was "do you still think that once players are back you'll be ok?" (sic) That's a fair and reasonable question.

You really are hard work. You could have just answered "Yes, I still think we'll be ok once we get more players back as we're still nowhere near full strength" or "no, I've changed my mind as I've intimidated over recent posts. Returning players aren't relevant anymore".
Instead you choose to make a big deal of it. Wtf is your problem? You seem to want to pick and choose what you're prepared to discuss. You're worse than Donald fecking Trump.

I've told myself many times not to engage with you. I think it's about time I listened.

Fwiw, whilst I've lost hope of us getting to the GF or anything like that, I still have a lingering sense of optimism that we'll end the season by regaining a bit of self respect if we can get our players back (I'm a masochist). Its a big if as we have been losing them faster than we've been getting them back all season so it may never happen, but I still fancy us to be a much bigger challenge when we get the guys back. Dodd will make us marginally better in attack (how we've been since he's been missing dispelled any notion he was the problem. We've actually been far worse without him) but it's not our attack I have faith in, it'll be the defence which is probably the most important thing in the play offs. I think it's looked a lot better over the last few games (Hull KR aside who seem to just be able to cut us open regardless) and when you can take out some of the lightweight edges such as robertson, bennison and one of blake/ritson and replace them with welsby, percival and makinson. When we can take out whitley and have Sironen there instead, have Bell coming off the bench, and Clark back as starting hooker then I think our defence should show far more steel than it has been doing.

You seem to be acting here as though Stu has been proven wrong but he hasn't really, our injury situation has never gotten better. It's lasted too long for us to really amount to any serious challenge for the title at this point, but to act like it's not been a huge factor in us falling off a cliff this season is a strange one. You say our attack hasnt been good enough for the last few years, but it's been enough to get the job done far more often than not (before the 2nd half of this season i mean)

To be honest I think Saints biggest problems are Walmsley and Paasi, to say they have been underwhelming since their return from injury is an understatement. They made, collectively, less than 70m at Warrington yesterday and Wire had their best two props sat in the stand. If you cannot get any go forward you have no field position which makes it very difficult to score tries unless, of course, you have French, Field and Wardle in your team. One thing is for sure no team can keep defending its way to wins if it is not scoring tries and Saints return of for in four isn’t going to win any game. That is nearly as bad as our football team Stu, two in three!

It's looking a longer and longer shot but I still won't rule them out totally with a full team (as full as it can be now) because I've seen teams like Leeds in the past find a way to win tight play off games and they've had seasons where they've been in a far bigger mess than Saints have been in this year (2017 jumps out, with them turning a 60 point hiding at the Jungle in to a GF win against the same opposition).

It's unlikely but not impossible. I think they'll finish 6th now and that'll likely mean then needing to go away to Wire and then Wigan or HKR to make the final. You can't see it but put it this way, I think the top 2 or 3 clubs would rather face a Leeds, Salford etc than they would an experienced Saints team.

I wasn't insinuating that Stu has been proven wrong. I was just asking if his opinion had stayed the same (I'm still not sure either way). It won't be proved right or wrong until the end of the season. The reason I asked is that after seeing your game yesterday I thought the players he'd mentioned previously as potential saving graces were actually among the worst performers. Walmsley and Paasi in particular. My own opinion hasn't changed but as I said above we'll only know if I was right come the end of the season.

Do you think Wellens will trust Dodd again? He seems to have turned his back on him a little.

And most of Walmsleys metres were him chasing his own knock ons.

Giving him and Lomax 3 year deals have been horrendous business decisions. One of our biggest mistakes is rewarding loyalty wrongly instead of being ruthless when a players body has packed up and letting them down each week.

Not sure if Walmsley has come back too soon again and may look different after an off season but he’s a shadow of what he was. Lomax was finished last season

The problem was that he didn’t for the Ashton try, a big sin in rugby league in my book. You drop the ball you get on it and nullify any possible attack.

Think the Leigh game will be a pretty big indicator of how the season will finish. We should (by all the reports I've seen) have everybody back that we're going to get back (think its just hurrell that won't be) so if we can put in a good performance and maybe even a win and we could finish higher than 6th, regain some confidence and then have an easier (not easy) play off game to perhaps play ourselves into a little bit of form. Or if we play well and lose, we could perhaps gain a bit of confidence to take into Wire away and at the very least, give them a scare.

If we fold to Leigh then it's just over. If we go away to Warrington with no confidence, we're getting beat handily. Like you say, it's all a long shot anyway. Yes we are getting the players back but as its the last game of the season, they're hardly going to be match fit. We'd need the stars to align pretty perfectly for us to form any kind of turn around in the time we have left

I don't think he has any choice other than to trust Dodd again tbh. Lomax and Mbye is about as pedestrian as it gets and as has been pointed out... We're not scoring any points at all. Way worse than we were when we had Dodd. Mbye has been kicking well, but offers pretty much nothing else going forwards. I think Dodd gives us quite a bit more and can obviously kick as well.

The other option is carrying on with Robertson at FB and putting Welsby in the halves, but I think having Robertson as FB for intense play off games is akin to suicide, and he went off injured against Warrington anyway, so may not even be possible.

I actually thought Warrington weren't very good themselves on Saturday. They were pretty poor with the ball, and had poor discipline themselves albeit their defence was good. But on the showings of this week, it's really hard to look past anything else than a KR v Wigan final. You lot seem a cut above at the moment

And as an example of how inferior Wellens is to his predecessor, he wouldn't have dared do that under Woolf.

I don’t think you can pin that on Wellens, schoolboys and schoolgirls don’t need reminding to do that.

Agree, I thought the game was a real step down in intensity after watching Friday night. And you'd have to say that Wire have less of an excuse there than Saints in terms of disruption to their squad, although I suppose too they were always likely to be finishing 3rd in any event so maybe that was in the back of their minds.

After Friday I'm now as confident as you can be in knockout games that Wigan will make the final. I wasn't sure about the gas we had left in the tank, but Friday has given me a lot more confidence that we can raise our game for the last three or four games.

Hull KR, I'm not so certain how they'll react in a semi against Wire or maybe a slightly more fully-fit Saints. On the one hand they looked like a much more hardened team ready to compete in these sorts of games compared to the CC semi and SL semi last year. That said, they still got beat and despite what some were saying about the first half and yellow cards, thoroughly deserved to get beat.

So how do they respond to that? Do they take confidence that they're on the right track or still think feel like they're short when the chips are down? Will they think that being very structured and process driven might not be enough when they come up against a team that can do the same, but with a Bevan French, George Williams or Jack Welsby?

They absolutely deserve to be in the final on the evidence of what we've seen so far, but would I back them in a tough looking semi? Hard to say.

Dark days ahead for Saints https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-leagu ... 8d91d1z22o Covid loans and having your own stadium isn't as lucrative as it seems. In all seriousness, What was the IMG remit again? The game needs some Paul Wellens 'Honest Discussions' about where it is headed and with the new tackling protocols next season, how the hell can it be sold as entertainment.

Dark days ahead for Saints https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-leagu ... 8d91d1z22o Covid loans and having your own stadium isn't as lucrative as it seems. In all seriousness, What was the IMG remit again? The game needs some Paul Wellens 'Honest Discussions' about where it is headed and with the new tackling protocols next season, how the hell can it be sold as entertainment.