Exeter Rhino wrote:
Looking at some of the tries scored, it is clear that there is a long way to go...
Lots of Catalans players dropping off, e.g. for Burrow's try. At the other end McGuire made a bad one-on-one miss for one of their tries. Replacing him (with Widdop?) must still be a priority, at least for next season.
Not to say that I'm not pleased with the result. At least this game shows that we can put a game to bed when we are on top. The result takes us back to Leeds as a work in progress early in the season - thankfully the overall trajectory is still positive. The Cas game still looms large as a warning - much work to be done to prove it was a blip. Hopefully this result will give the team a bit more confidence and patience in games to come.
I would be more concerned if Catalans had been dropping off tackles all game but they weren't. So that would point more to us playing well and making them drop off tackles rather than them simply not being up for it.
The Burrow try is a great example of this in my opinion. The previous 2 runs/tackles to Burrow by (IIRC) Golding and Briscoe put the Catalans defence in disarray and opened up that gap for Burrow to force his way through. If he'd run like that at a set defence we'd have been picking him up from behind the Carnegie Stand.
That kind of work from the back 3 is back to how we were in 2015 in terms of setting up the set of 6. If we keep doing that we'll be just fine.