A frustrating yet brilliant performance : Mon May 21, 2012 9:26 pm
What a strange side we've turned into. For 75% of the pitch tonight I thought we were utterly superb. The pack were completely and utterly dominant from start to finish. Puletua and Roby were brilliant as usual and I thought Josh Perry had his best performance yet for us. His kicking game is brilliant and he also laid the platform for it by making the hard yards too. His 'd' was also stellar. If we can get that out of him every week we'll be fine. Laffranchi was solid, Flanagan and Sia too. Off the back of that I thought J-Lo was fantastic. Shenton's run and flick pass was Lyon-esque. Early ball and utterly sensational centre play from him there. If he is going to HKR, they are getting a player who can be the best centre in Super League. He's got it in him, it's up to coaches to get it out of him. Sensational finish from TMak as well, which made up for him costing us the McGuire try.
But enough of the positivity. The pack laid the platform so well tonight that we dominated field position completely. Phil said at half time Leeds had 9 play the balls in our 20 and not many in our half. We'd had 22 in their 20 and more in their half. And the score was 12-12. We just don't do enough to threaten in the opposition 20. We don't have set moves, there are no dummy runners, no clever runs or deceptive passes. It's just lumbering, slow play the balls, an obvious pass and an easy tackle repeated 5 times until we put a grubber into the first defender's shin. We're horrible in that regard. Wello has to take an awful lot of the flack in terms of our attacking, I'd love to see a stat on how many times per game he is tackled in the opposition 20. He seems to waste 2 tackles per set just lumbering in. There is a bit on 62 minutes that is classic Wello. 'Chiming' into the line very slowly, behind the play, stumbles into the line and falls at their feet with the ball.
If we can sort the attack out we can beat Wigan. Our pack matched them last week sans-TP and they can do so again. But we could have three weeks worth of sets on their line and not score more than a couple of tries from kicks. It's got to improve. Tonight was a 50 point win disguised as a close game because of our inability to threaten when we have field position.
