We are told that we have a top coach yet he selects Johnson who cannot defend and has had a nightmare in pre season games . He has Walton , Hall and Tansey who have all shown up well in pre season and does not select them . Instead Arundel gets a game who has shown nothing in pre season . He plays Arona at 13 - why . He signs Antony Tupu who is obviously a busted flush , then he selects Tupu to play who has done nothing in pre season . He selects softy Anderson who gets dominated in every game he plays yet leaves Yates and Anakin out of the squad . The point I am making is that our coach is making some really basic selection errors and those errors cost us the game today.
Hope changes are made for next week .

No HE isn't!

he has wrecked every club he has been to - never won a thing- he is good for the first year(he did what we needed him to do last year- we should of got rid of after that)

if he stays for full season we will be relegated.

Jeez. You baffle me. You really do.

Your having a laugh with this one

Nice to get positive feedback!

Calm down, you'll have a completely different team for the middle 8's !

I cannot disagree more unless you were watching a different game. The pass Johnson tried was on and would have put BJB into a gap but he dropped it. I remember Johnson getting back to make the tackle into touch to stop a certain Widnes try at the start of the second half.
I don't remember Anderson going backwards and Arona ran hard. It's our first game and in my view we have made progress on last season. I would expect that if Hall, Walton or Tansey had played you would have people on here saying exactly the same about them.
We all I suppose have our favourite villains but not today, mistakes were made but it's only game one and let's face it we won our first two last season and look what happened then.

I'd go as far as saying the same people criticising would use these selections to criticise too. The facts aren't the issue.
I'll defend anyone's right to have an opinion but unfortunately some just hang around waiting for a sniff of bad news and want to show they knew all along.
They are never posting when we win.

Not trolls, they are vultures. I really don't understand why but that's just the diversity of life.

Whatever he is, he's a country mile ahead of any alternative.

I despair I really do, one game in and already the knives are sharpening. A couple of costly errors today other than that we matched Widnes man for man, won the second half and imo the difference in performance from last season to this was an almighty chasm. Yes there is still work to do but come on we were tonked 80 odd 50 odd 60 odd and more last season, give the guy a break for goodness sake.

Good thread this.

He's the best we could ask for and the best we could expect. We're not a great team (yet), but there were lots of improvements across the pitch today compared to most of last season. Give the man time to get his selection balanced and find who fits in which position best. He's nearly there with it and hopefully he can settle the lads before the big game next week

Didn't someone predict this thread a couple of weeks ago?

It's a fair debate, albeit there is not much support for it at this point.

My opinion - if we can't beat a bottom 4 team at home, regardless of the where's and whys, then we have a long, long season ahead. We are banking on getting better - do we not think that other teams will do exactly the same? For me, I don't get the acceptance of failure and our mentality of trying to pull the positives from what was a gift of a win to Widnes.

Brian Smith, Wayne Bennet, whoever, you are judged on results. There is a bloody long way to go and I really fear that there are few 'lower hanging fruits' for us to pick than a home game against a team that play on plastic!

Scared - proper scared!

I do agree with some people - to a certain extent.

But what can Brian Smith do about Tom Johnstone's brain fart - and BJB not fielding a pretty easy kick.
We gifted 12 points from these basic errors, easy to say but without those 2 gifts we probably would have won!