Dowes was solid .
Afraid i personally thought radford look poor in attack , he's no Fitzgibbon , and his offloads where rubbish and not needed.
I thought we needed to play alot smarter and stop forcing the pass!

I agree. Much better in the 2nd half IMO.

On the thread topic, completely go with the Dowes appreciation. Don't see the Radford praise though, thought he made some poor decisions with the ball and a couple of silly handling errors. Typified by his idiotic effort on the 2nd tackle ten yards out as we looked to secure the game and he decided to try an offload that wasn't on and just ended up throwing the ball pretty much directly forward over his head as he hit the deck. That is not the sort of thing you want or should expect from one of the most experienced players in the squad, it's schoolboy stuff. I won't knock his effort (especially defensively), but his execution wasn't great for me.

radford is a knock on penalty machine

Dowes was arguably our best forward tonight. Also Lauaki put in a good stint after his initial penalty/feck-up flurry. Lovely ball out to Turner. I do think Lauaki is an overly targeted by referees.

Doesn't help himself cleaning people out after the ball has gone though. Agree he looked better 2nd half.

You're probably right.

Thing is, we needed him to play a lot of solid minutes in the second half, which is sort of the opposite of his game, and I thought he did pretty well.

Lauaki needs to improve for me . Not cutting it at the moment.

He did, I agree. Which was most surprising given his poor start. I hope he puts a few good performances together back to back, and I think he needs to TBH as there seem to be plenty willing to get on his back quite quickly in the stands. His size and aggression could be real assets for us if he can just harness them on a consistent basis.

Needs more minutes IMO.

Idiotic about sums it up. Quite what he thinks he's going to gain by trying an almost impossible offload, early in the tackle count when we're leading by 2 with 10 minutes left is beyond me. Unfortunately, he's done it before (and cost us games) and I don't have much doubt that he'll do it again. That aside, he was as ineffectual as usual with the ball, constantly turning into the tackle, making poor ground and taking an eternity to get it played.

Needs to make better choices for me. Too often takes the wrong option in attack, or makes an error and then follows it up with a penalty trying to make good.