Agree, 3 small blokes sat on the bench when Brown is 18th man, seems strange, not feeling that confident.

Need to be careful with Brown, should certainly be in that 17 with the players we have out, don't want to lose him.

Thats a very poor bench selection in my opinion
expected Savelio to be missing but we are carrying three hookers and not to include Brown in front of Houghton is crazy

Yep have to say I agree, half expected no Savelio but not having Sao or Brown either we look very lightweight. I can only assume Brown isn’t 100% otherwise it’s a very strange decision not to have him on the bench and go with 3 hookers.

Think it will be a tough afternoon looking at the 2 sides.

For Cas?
All sounding good from sunny Puerto De La Cruz.

Optimism oozing from your pores again at the start of another campaign.

I'd have gone with Brown too, but this Cas team is old and slow and maybe Smith tactically wanted a more mobile team to run the legs off them rather than it being a case of Brown being out of favour.

FFS!

At least we won't be too over confident next week. When I saw our side, I'd have taken any win, we were excellent for 60 minutes, just collapsed.

Happy with the two points, hopefully a couple back to change it slightly with the short turnaround.

Got to go with a bigger bench.

Good to see we haven't changed too much
Decent going forward, dreadful defensively.
Thought it was odd that we had all 3 of Evans, Taylor and Satae off at the same time for a bit.
2 points to get off the mark I suppose.

Well I’ll take 2pts but we should face killed that game off. Cas were always going to come out strongly in the 2nd half and we seemed to drop our work rate and the intensity. Not sure why we played Houghton for 60 minutes either.
Some good points but some bad ones too and still much work to do.

Easy!

Very frustrating, but also relief, we definitely need more size on the bench next week. We just put the cue on the rack after an hour thinking we'd done enough and gifted Cas countless chances to get back into the game. Hoy and Clifford look like they'll be good for us.
Dont know why they were allowed to wear the same colour kit as us.

Well that was fun

Horrible last twenty minutes but Cas to be fair were really throwing caution to the wind.

First half though was very good and hopefully we'll see that sort of rugby this year. Some cracking tries. Dwyer was very impressive in that first forty.

At least Smith has a idea what needs working on.

Its two points Chris but i think we will have to get used to what we see as seemingly questionable selection decisions by Tony Smith.
I agree playing Houghton for 60 mins was crazy.He tried to play at a faster pace but was still much too slow but i think he will go with this Dwyer/Houghton combo for most of the season if they are fit.
Didnt help us either to have Taylor,Satae and Evans all off together.
You have to wonder sometimes what goes through the heads of coaches.
Thought Griffin and Lane were ok but i think we need more than OK in this position and just hope Savelio gets some form back
Carlos hopefully back in for Cam Scott and he may help Ben McNamara with a bit more on field talking and we shouild have Ligi Sao back to give us a bit more size and punch down the middle.