Quote: SirStan "Where to start? Jesus, I'll begin at the end.
In the car on the way home listening to the post-match interviews. The one that summed the entire night (season?) for me was listening to Richard Horne. He basically said that after getting a beasting at Catalans, Hull had spent all week training to get a 3rd man into the tackle and thus control the ruck. I think its fair to say that they took this onto the pitch with them. Defensive training appears to be an alien concept at Rovers this season.
Hull's defence was light years ahead of ours, and has been in all 3 games this year. In fact, as a contest, last night was even more one sided than Good Friday, without the scoreboard reflecting it. Hull bombed at least 3 more scores before half time.
On the back of such a solid defence, it was just a matter of time before we caved in. We were making 30-40 metres in a set, while Hull were going full length without any help from Silverwood (what was the penalty count? It felt like 2 to 1 in our favour). At 20-18, It felt like we were about to mug them again. The final 2 tries at least made the scoreboard reflect the game a little more. I'm not going to bang on about how poor some of our players looked, they were coached & picked by Mr Motivator and he's getting my backing until he's either failed or succeeded with his own team. Hull looked up for it, motivated, organized and quite frankly, much better than us. I shudder to think how much worse it could have been without their list of absentees (for 1 reason or another).
Gluton for punishment, I'm popping for my Widnes tickets at lunch. Keep the faith (yeah, right!).'"
I noticed the Hull players practicing 3 man tackling in the warm up. To be fair, our defence hasn't been that great all season but looked much better last night. I think gentle is probably a very clever coach but has been dealing with a bunch of half wits up until now. Hopefully we'll see what he's really made of next season when he has his own team
