As poor as London were last week, we struggled to get out of our own half without the aid of the referee because the ball never went past the first forward and we were too easy to read, it's a big compliment to our forwards that despite there only being one runner at a time they were still making good yards, the only time we became anything like expansive was in their 20/30m area, and even then we've got this obsession with constantly going to the short side, Ben Cockayne must have wondered why he was on the field last week because not matter how far to the right the play the ball was they still went to the right. It's almost as if the players think they aren't capable of passing the ball down the line.
My expectations of the team this season was that having had a full season to gel and a pre season on top of that, they would perform to the level that they did in the second half of last season, that isn't unreasonable given that they're full time professional players that don't do anything other than train and play the game and that in turn would have been good enough to get us in the play offs IMO.

Cas did play well but were so utterly abysmal that it is hard to know how the game would have gone if we had got off the bus. If you play like that the opposition will look good. That said Cas have done well lately but it is still a game we should have been looking to win as is the next timne we play them

You have to get through good sets of 6 and we have consistently failed to do that. Yes it can be a bit dull, but that's RL these days. Big, fast strong, go-forward battering rams who have to win the battle to get up off the floor quickly and win easy yards. No errors. Kicks that make the opposition play from deep. Of course we all know this, but it is something we did quite well under Kear more often than we have under Agar. You have to win the field position before you can start the flashy stuff. We often try to play ourselves out of a box with flashy stuff in the wrong part of the pitch and pay the price.

After 18 games last year we had 12 points - this year we have 15.
The run at the end of last year came as a result of a settled and injury-free (relatively speaking) squad.

The start of last season saw us struggle to get the best out of our key player as he had no suitable foil to work with (Smith and Sykes).
This year we have been missing that foil once again for a large part of the season, now he is back and we have won the last 2 games (all be it against "weaker" opposition).
Perhaps we should wait another few weeks to see whether Sykes can add that extra dimension to Smith's game again and we can then kick on like we did last year.

I do think there are a couple of games that have got away from us that realistically we should/could have won but that happens to everyone over the course of a season.
We have a lot to do to make the top 8 this season but at this stage of last season you would have given us absolutely zero chance of making it so let's not assume that this season can't be the same.

Yep agree with that.

When suggesting we 'should' have won certain games, some people conveniently forget that there are an equal number of living, breathing, thinking (to some extent) human beings on the pitch, who have a say in how that pans out; we're not playing against cardboard cut-outs!

There are many games that we 'could' have won, but I'm not sure about 'should.'