French needs a full pre-season to get into our systems, it was always expected he would play on the bench. He only came over early due to visa reasons. Lam has made that explicitly clear in every interviews

Can’t blame Williams. He was being asked to produce try scoring opportunities from his own 30 - which he did a couple of times. Not to mention he spent most game doing the jobs of our pack who were only getting back by tackle 3.

Interception try and omitting to pass to Marshall says otherwise for.
I'm a Wiliams fan but for me tonight he was poor by his standards.
By the way I blame all the players but only a minority have the talent to change a game.
Beaten tonight by a far superior team but the senior players let themselves down tonight and I'm hoping they will respond accordingly

They probably wont play that well at OT but even if they drop off by 20% they will be far too good for that team.

I am not sure the senior lads have got it in them! Flower and Lockers look a shadow of the players they were, Clubb is simply not good enough. Sarge will play and we need him. Unless our defensive line speed improves we will not win next week, never mind at OT. Our defence has been good over the past few months but just when we needed to perform that deserted us as well. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to win a game were you miss so many tackles and make so few yards.

Wouldn't worry too much about Clubb, he's got a ban coming for the next game!

"Too late!", they cried.

Embarrassing thread. One minute we are praising our young forwards (Smithies tackling record, Partington/Byrne aggression) and a week later it's the worst forward performance in our history.

No lack of effort from our boys. They were just thoroughly outplayed from the first second of the game. Saints produced the best 40 minutes of RL I've seen this year. We were up for it, not shy of any effort but Saints were red hot and blew us away, which we all knew if they played like they can do that would happen. Credit the opposition.

Salford next week will be tough.

Pretty poor performance but I don't read too much into it saints were red hot tonight I also don't think you could beat them twice leaving the gf for the one to win.

Im not saying that you lost deliberately but I would not be so worried. Saints will go into the gf maybe a bit overconfidant? I can imagine saints would want salford in gf over you lot still.

Exactly this. I sat back at half time and said sometimes you just have to tip your hat and say well done to the opposition. That was a fantastic display of RL and in that form Saints would have given anybody a good hiding.
I actually thought Clubb’s challenge was fair. He was committed to the challenge and no way he could pull out. He also tried to wrap his arms around so not a shoulder charge. No issues for me.

If he doesn't, he may get in trouble for putting undue pressure on the ankle of Percival in the 13th minute.

I said the same to two guys in the queue for the ale at half time. Saints went 39 minutes without making a mistake and played some decent stuff so sometimes it just is how it is.
Clubb has become a passenger and even playing with injuries it is hard not to be critical of his performances. Nowt wrong with the challenge

I have got to disagree with the effort statement. We stood back and let them run at us rather than meeting them close to the ptb. Line speed was woeful. To allow the likes of Tompson 10 meters plus meters after the tackle was criminal, it had the hallmarks of a game lost before kickoff. The deficiencies in the squad have been obvious all season but the nature of our defence has gone some way to covering for that, tonight just exposed the problem. What do we tell the little uns in training? Get in his face and stop him gaining momentum. That is what Saints did to us and in return we ended up on our backsides time and time again.

I know players should play for pride but once the game gad gone it must be in the back if their minds that they have another chance next week.


The final will be different again