Positives

Howarth gave everything.
BJB didn't look bad.
England had a decent game.
Widnes hammered Leeds by more than they beat us!

Negatives

Scrotum doesn't appear to have the guts for it.
Kirkmond is a shadow of the version we had on loan and for 12-18 months after he signed.
Nowhere near enough urgency in defence, can't give genuinely quality pivots like Cas have time to do what they want.
Lyne and Gibson seemed to part like the red sea a couple of times for no apparent reason.
Finn's kicking was woeful (compare to that of Gale and the precision of the bombs).
Cats looked and extremely good side and will beat much better sides than us.

Southern agreed a pay off, although whether he ever actually received it is a moot point thanks to Elston. The other instance you quote is when we went belly up and ended up in a cva so unless we want to go down route its a no go. Fact is our recruitment has left us using too much cap up on too many average squad players and we have very little room for manoeuvre.

It is frustrating.

We probably have about £125k-£150k worth of salary sitting in the stands week in week out not getting the game time.

That money would go a long way towards a very good half back

Do the club actually have a chief exec these days. I know Kath replaced Elston, but she has gone, and I havent ever heard her been replaced

To be fair, we handled Cas pretty well for 30 - 35 mins, but did a lot of defending in the process. My issue is that we were just so dominated in the middle, our backs had no where to go.

The defence lurched between good and horrendous, at least 3 of their tries came from busting through 3,4 or 5 attempted tackles - not good enough in SL.

Having said that, I thought we were unfortunate again at certain times in the first half, that bizarre shoulder charge call, Finn not quite being able to get to the loose ball which let them go over in the corner.

I think we can play a lot better as a group but need to start gelling fast and as that comes on, speed up the attack.

Positives, well we’ve got HKR next week, with the numbers they have out, we won’t have a better chance than in a long time. Then the next home game against the French could go either way.

Negatives, the game in-between those two.

We're not in the World Club Challenge are we?

Agree with that and add England to our best player. We have currently players playing no where near what they're capable of. Kirmond, Scruton and Finn although not the only ones, they're a a pale imitation of themselves these first 2 games.

In Kirmond's case, unfortunately it looks like injuries have caught up with him and he's just not capable physically of performing like he did a couple of years ago. There's no way he can Captain imo when he seems to be struggling so much with his own game, it's no benefit to either side. As for Finn we know what he did at Cas, we knew he wasn't a flash player but for them he did the little things right and guided them around the park. Atm there's non of that on show and the pairing of Finn and Miller look like they've just met each other for the first time before the game.

Some how we've got to find some domination and aggression in the forwards, Simon we'll add a bit of that but we need a lot more and we need to try some new faces, maybe try Annakin, Walker and Molloy and give Hal a crack at SO, it can't hurt and may give the other players a kick up the . Without our forwards setting a platform our backs will continue to look crap. Add to that if we don't find a win or two, players confidence is going to continue to fall and then we'll really be screwed.

When we played Leeds at boxing day, yes it was a friendly but still I actually thought our defense looked pretty good, came up quick as a line and they worked well with each other and hardly missed a tackle. What's happened since then, sloppy tackles, poor reads and a real lack of dominating as a group in the tackles and slowing the PTB down.

I always thought it'd take time to gel as a side, with a fair number of new faces but it's so frustrating when they're making silly mistakes and some players are just not performing.

Not how I saw it. Finn could have easily dived on that ball but instead he just stood by and watched the Cas player pick it up. I thought we could easily have been going in 6 all at half time. Instead we gift them two tries and the game was pretty much gone by the time they'd scored straight after half time.

Right, I thought England and bill tupou went well. How arthritis was ok but his passing from dummy half can be painfully slow at times and if he sped it up he could be a good hooked.

I thought that we did ok in the first half but again made too many mistakes and cas made us pay which was the difference. As for the 2nd half we were awful. Not only was our tackling at time attrotious but we never looked like scoring.

I don't like to bag individual players but I am afraid from what I have seen from him so far he is not good enough. He is just too slow and his kicking and passing game is below standard.

Finally I would just like to say that even though we let in 7 try I thought our left hand side defence was good. Cas didn't get through on that side once so I think we have to credit arundal and bill tupou for that.

If Kirmon, Scruton and other forwards are injured or completely off form then replace them with Molloy, Simon, Yates and Walker for the Hull KR game...

Thought Walton had been playing centre in pre season? Surprised that he was ahead of Molloy or Yates for interchange second row yesterday.

Don't see how we will win at Hull KR tbh. Injuries or not they'll be targeting us as well be targeting them - and our performances there recently have been diabolical. Their halfbacks (even withou Campese) are infinitely superior to ours.

I think looking at all the posts we seem to agree that on paper we look not bad a side and can compete, but at least 4-5 are nowhere near the quality levels of previous years, and that's what's killing us, we all need to be at the races week in week out as we haven't got world class match winners, too many players have gone missing and arnt giving the goods, we can just afford 1-2 at most but anything above that then however we have prepared for the game is out the window,,
I'm giving it another few weeks, before commiting to the doom, however Warrington away in few weeks will be a marker to any improvement as that was a horror show last year,,