rlhttp://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/Hull-FC-s-Lee-Radford-fans-unhappy-ll-handle/story-26255198-detail/story.htmlrl



Been awhile since I posted on here but like a lot of people I am somewhat frustrated with how things are currently going at the club and decided to share my thoughts after reading the above article and specifically this quote.

For me, I am well aware of the margins of defeat. We push teams close and that's great in a way. But it's not getting us the two points. And we pushed teams close last year in a similar manner but failed to get the two points in those games too. For me, the margin of defeat is very much on my mind and only adding to my frustration as I'm not seeing any improvement on last year.

I'm also very aware that the table is tight and just one victory is capable of propelling us up the table. But as I've seen pointed out elsewhere we don't do back to back victories so even if we do beat Rovers we're likely to go and lose to Saints on Easter Monday which will see us plummet back down the table. Of course I'd love us to beat KR and I will celebrate if we do but one victory isn't going to suddenly make everything a lot better.

Is this how others feel? Or just me?

The thing about these margins are, the other team have bbombed easy tries. When these teams kick in, they wont bomb these chances. So those margins will grow.
Losing by 1 point or 59 points has the same outcome, nothing in the win column.
Pearson called for the fans to rally this season, we answered thar call. But we wont do it again if we aint tting anything in return.
Radders thinks losing by one point and bringing it up every week, fans will think the way is. Sorry radders but no. We want a winning team, after all that's what the games about

I'm not sure I'd agree on your first point, it's pure conjecture really. We've bombed chances too and you could say that we've not kicked in either? Just playing devils advocate, but I think that's a pretty negative way to look at it. Ultimately, like you say, it's the mark in the win column that counts.

It is an interesting point regarding our margins of defeat. We've only been blown away in one half of rugby this season, out of 14. The rest of them we're very even if we think about it. The problem is, we've endured 7/8 years of frustration and bad decisions leading up to this and we're all fed up of it.

Here are our 14 half margins for the statos out there:

v Hudds - 1st Half - 6-0 W
v Hudds - 2nd Half - 13-0 W (won 19-0)

v Wire - 1st Half - 0-6 L
v Wire - 2nd Half - 6-1 W (lost 6-7)

v Salford - 1st Half - 14-16 L
v Salford - 2nd Half - 14-16 L (lost 28-32)

v Leeds - 1st Half - 12-0 W
v Leeds - 2nd Half - 0-43 L (lost 12-43)

v Wigan - 1st Half - 0-12 L
v Wigan - 2nd Half - 12-1 W (lost 12-13)

v Catalans - 1st Half - 22-10 W
v Catalans - 2nd Half - 11-12 L (won 33-22)

v Cas - 1st Half - 4-6 L
v Cas - 2nd Half - 10-14 L (lost 20-14)

A possibly more alarming stato is our points.

We're the lowest point scorers with 124, just 22 tries scored.

Yet we have the 5th best defence, despite playing 6 of the current top 7 teams.


That probably backs up what people have said on here about the attitude and hard work being good, we're just seriously lacking in attacking ideas and having the mettle to win a close game.

The top teams gauge themselves on winning when they're playing badly, scraping a tight one when in all probability it should be a loss. This statement is almost throwing in the face of this and saying you're playing well but still losing.
It does become a mentality thing, look at the saints game at the weekend, they had no right to get it that close but they did, the belief was always there (regardless of bad calls going there way) Wigan and Leeds do the same.

Who cares, we are 2nd bottom, play terrible rugby, and it don't look like changing soon, same old same old, it was so obvious before the season started, don't know why we expected anything different

That's not strictly true. a winning margin of 3 points is required.

Sorry to be the village pedant, but these things need pointing out, it's all part of derby week.

Thanks for that. Added loads to the thread.

Yeh because its so exciting, and completely pointless, I was bored, like you must be responding to it. Your response added so much, well done.

Is our defence that good, we have made the 10th most tackles but have missed the 3rd most, I reckon our tackles to missed ratio must be one of the worst in the league, we are only making less tackles than other teams as in most games we have more possession as our errors are low, the problem is that we can't turn our possession advantage into points.

Please don't derail a thread just because you don't find it interesting. If you don't have anything to say, don't post.

P.S. I sound like a mod there. I'm not.

Then why post?

Some of us (like me) are number geeks and find this kind of thing sadly interesting.

If the club think the tight margins are being overlooked, they need to realise it's because it has developed into a consistent theme. A certain amount of leeway was given at first last season, but then gradually eroded away. With no change this term fans are understandably at the end of their tethers and making less allowances for what is now a consistent problem that is not being rectified.

Also another point to consider: In 3 of the 4 narrow losses, we were the last team to score and therefore narrow the gap, so there is an element of adding respectability to the scoreline without necessarily looking like being on the verge of winning.

I don't have any stats to back this up so it's just my opinion but I personally think our defence is quite good for the most part but we do seem to have points in games were it seems to fall apart a bit. We need to improve the attack though because defence doesn't put points on the board.

I can empathise completely with this. At the tail end of the 2012 season Rovers suffered 5 straight losses by 6 or less points. Sandercock leapt on this as some sort of vindication of the job he was doing, whereas it just narked most of the fans off even more. A win is a win, a loss, a loss. It's that black & white (no pun intended) to your average fan.