If your plan A isn't working something you need off the cuff rugby to get you going again, agree we do miss leadership on the pitch when Ellis is off hopefully Houghton or Taylor will take that over at some point.

One of those nights.
A team came with a game plan, and aided by a poor referee, it was successful for them. Rubbish to watch though. Just not smart enough to find a solution to the constant niggling/slowing down at the ruck.
Proved how important Ellis is to us, and doubts still remain over a couple of players.
Glad it's over (Catalan never seem to deviate from spoiling tactics), and we move on.

Watched the match again this morn and its surprising how the match seems different on telly. Firstly IMO cats deserved the win. There had better control and played a lot of the match in our half. Taylor really wants to have a look how he rushes in for the big tackles a lot come across as shoulder charges. Conner IMO just tried to hard. Forwards on the whole did fine but thought mini had a very average game. Sneyd was very quite and thought the bench lacked that spark and Bowden was the best IMO. Maybe time to give turgut or masi a run ? All in all early days and although disappointing not the end of the world. Kelly will defo help our cause and hope Ellis is OK.

No complaints about the result. We tried hard but lacked direction in attack and played some dumb rugby. Too many of our big name players had an off day. We badly missed Ellis and Kelly. Cats had a good game plan and executed it well, aided and abetted by Hicks, but poor as he was, he didn't lose us the the match, we did that ourselves. Very disappointing but there's a lot of rugby left yet. Hoping for a better show against Huddersfield. COYH.

Poor refereeing decisions against both sides. The one that could have been most telling was the disallowing of the Inu "try". That possibly kept you in the game. Expect this to be a low point for you and things will probably get better as too many good players did not perform as expected last night.

I dont get all this going on about him being on the wing
He was our top metre man last night and wakey I think..so that's valuable to us..But he's an error machine at the min and was in pre season. He'd be worse still if we added play making decisions on him as well.
Not to menton the fact in D he's always been a ltitle erratic and Carlos has 2 impecable defensive displays in 2 games under his belt and looks to have a real understanding with Manu
I'd be 5 games in with kelly at 6 before I thought about changing it up
Fonua has managed so far at storm and Tonga before us not to be set to either wing or centre. But in this league for me I still see him being a carney style weapon on the wing rather than another big physical centre of which the leagues full of

Agree with this, Keep Fonua on the wing, defensively he really isn't great, getting him one on one with the opposing winger, high kicks into the corner or dabs through are where his strengths lie.

The main reason we lost was ill-discipline, players losing the plot making totally irrational decisions Taylor's especially but not the only one.
You know games like this are going to be tight, they already knew from the Wakey game that giving away needless penalties loses games.
It's a little worrying how far we are in the first two games this season compared to last season when we destroyed Salford and Cats with some great attacking and smart rugby.

How they react against Hudds will show us where we are, and we can't make excuses if a couple of players are absent, whilst Ellis has a big impact we are not a one man team.

Agreed. His physical attributes made him the centre he was last year. Not finesse. Still has those but as you say his real game strengths are winger type attributes
I think the signs are that Sika and carlos have a real good combo starting..complimented each other a few times last night. Carlos is defensivley sound. Not had a sign yet in 2 games of the right side defensive weaknesses that plagued us all year last year. Once hull get some attacking mojo and grounds harden I think kelly n carlos could be a wingers dream..Fonua 1 on 1 is scoring everytime

But Scotty going a hunting as you say will probably see him cop a ban

Best case scenario is we just had a bad day at the office, worst case scenario, last season was a flash in the pan and we're no more than a solid mid table team.

Last night was painful to watch and any Hull fan must have some nagging concerns after that. We still completely lack structure in attack. We didn't really challenge the catalans line on the few occasions we did manage to hold onto the ball and with sneyd continuing his form from last season we look clueless.

I'm not sure ellis would have made much difference TBH. Defensively we were very good but it was individual errors which really cost us any chance of winning the game. With even half decent ball control and discipline we would surely have taken the points with or without him.

So it could be a case of same old or next week could see us pick things up but we desperately need to find some form quickly or we'll be out of the running for top 4 by easter and looking over our shoulders at the middle 8's.

My only solace is that we surely can't play that badly again, can we?