I was surprised how much Salford had us pegged back in our own half, I've read a lot about our massive pack and how many options we have there but none of them were making many yards. Flower's not a prop for starters. Sam put in a few good long kicks and our kicks to the corners for the wingers were fine, it's putting in pressure kicks to gain a repeat set we seem to struggle with.

I'm not too worried at this stage, you can't read too much in to pre season, especially when most of the ones who played last night haven't played for a while. Last season I remember us comfortably beating Wire preseason and thinking we were going to walk the league, and it didn't turn out like that did it. I definitely think the 1st team need another preseason game on Friday though, then they've still got over a week before the SL opener.

Wasn't at the game but from what various people have told me and from reading stuff, it sounds like a number of people don't have the same view as you. By the sounds of it, Salford's kicking game was good and put us under pressure, so maybe their judgement was clouded by that? Who knows.

We made to many errors with ball in hand. Time and time again we tried the short ball to farrell/hock and dropped it stupid errors which we will need to cut out for next week.

What was richards thinking kicking through when he was one on one with veivers? All he needed to do was hand him off and he would have scored.

At least we have stuff to work on, we look defensively sound yet again but hopefully we will work on our attacking structure over this and next week.

And Joe Mellor came on for Finch with 6 to go, pretty pointless substitution really however I think I would play him off the bench in round one possibly at the expense of Tuson.

Our kicking last night wasn't the best , our long kicks was straight down the throat and i didnt see much attacking kicks tbh ,

Salfords long kicks turned our defenders facing our own line chasing back , they did a few grubbers but Sam had them well read and they put some mighty bombs up with pressure and Sam was on form with them and a good job as well .

I would like a bet that there were 10+ long range kicks last night from say inside our own 40 and as far as i can remember no more than 1 (And to be honest i'm struggling to remember any?) went straight down the throat of FB?

In fact I seem to remember Sams kicks getting decent applause from the fans on 4/5 occasions in the first half for finding the floor and splitting FB/Winger and turning them round?

Our main problem was that we didn't get enough field position (Especially 2nd half) to obtain repeat sets. I only seem to remember 1 repeat set (Drop out) for both teams and Salfords kicks to the corners were defended by our wingers equally if not better than Wigans kick to their counterparts.

I agree that Smith got 2 or 3 kicks in behind our line in the 1st half but thought Sam dealt with them pretty well (And certainly don't remember them scoring/looking like scoring from them) whereas the only time we had field position was 1st half and that action took place at the other end of the field so maybe our kicks didn't give the same impression as they weren't under our noses?

Twittering during the game works as notes for my match report and I referenced how Salford were putting Sam under pressure on the last tackle time and time and time and time again. Now Sam did put in a couple of good kicks in during a spell ten minutes up to half time but apart from that, I thought our last tackle options were bloody awful in comparison. It was same at Hull KR I thought - they were showing us how to create pressure on the last and it's been to our credit so far that we've defended them well.

It's a long time issue for me. I'd argue in the tight games we've lost to Warrington in last two years at DW Stadium, Lee Briers last tackle kicking has been the difference. Most clubs have a player who you'd give the ball to on the last, we don't and it'll cost us at the crunch I reckon.

Several kicks found the floor last night. A few found touch. A few found the wing/fullback who made about 5 yards before being smashed.

There were far more pressing things than our kicking game like the fact we dropped so much ball.

That was my take on it. The props in particular put quite a bit of ball down. From memory, Flower (twice), Lima, Eric and Mossop all dropped it.

Correct



Correct

Field position (or lack of it) was the main concern and more to do with Dropped ball (And a few fw passes) than the kicking game.