Certainly my view. They were two big misses in the context of how the game panned out.

For my sins I watched game again, arundel cost us two try's with his poor defence, Seymour 2 try's with his poor defence and interception pass.

Galea also guilty of a few basic errors, which cost us, we have a few players guilty of making individual errors and they keep making the same mistakes every time they play, hopefully some of these won't play this Friday.

Pretty much my thoughts. He's not been bad, just not hit his standard of last season and you have to wonder why.

Whilst I agree with the main gist of the point, I don't think it's unfair to say that Houghton has not played as well as he can. His passing has never been his strong point, but I think that this year we are seeing players having to adjust their runs or reach high for the ball too often. Passes from dummy half should be in the bread basket pretty much every time, and it is noticeable that Houghton is behind Heremaia in this area.

Having said all that, as in my other post I do think that our ptb speed is the main problem and restricts how effective our hookers can be.

Maybe on Saturday, but over the season so far I think it's been our ptb speed, which has been across almost the entire team but particularly the forwards. It also becomes more apparent the higher the calibre of opposition we play.

It's been a problem for years, although at times last season it improved noticeably. Not sure what the underlying reason is TBH.

I'm not convinced it did improve last season. I think we just worked around it at times by offloading a lot. That's where we're hugely missing Watts, Moa, Manu, and Ellis, as much as you can miss someone you haven't had. I've just looked the stats up, and we don't have anyone who has made double figures in offloads yet, and only one over 5. In 5 games and with the amount of forwards we have had playing big minutes that's pretty pitiful IMO.

Spot on. Our pack doesn't/can't steamroller the opposition so to get any go forward we have to commit tacklers and offload. Otherwise combined with the ptb speed a scooting hooker has no chance. That's Houghton's game. When he's forced into creating for other players from a standing start his decision making , speed of thought and passing let him down. The current England hooker , Roby , wouldn't be much different behind our pack at the moment.

I dont like to call anyone in the team but for my Lynch had an outstanding season and why on earth was the captaincey taken off him. He did great for us.

All this hype on Ellis coming and he decides to bring him as capt and he hasnt even played for us yet. Houghton has no experience of been a captain let alone a vice captain and unfortunately I dont think he can manage it. Lynch really got the team going last season. It really does make you wonder if there is a wee bit of jealousy there. I certainly would be peed off if it was me and also named player of the season.

I dont know the reasons why so I cant speculate but I do think it was the wrong thing to do. We just dont have a leader at all now. Hopefully when Ellis eventually gets back he will make a difference.