1. Team PerformanceBit of a curate's egg.
Walmsley, Roby, Swift, Vea, Percival, Wilkin have all had good seasons, albeit Vea and Wilkin suffered serious injury lay-offs.
LMS and Amor have had good games and bad games, but all need more consistency next year.
Tommy Makinson was excellent before his injury, but was way off form and confidence on his return. Hopefully a good close-season and he'll be back to his best. I had worries about the lack of size in our wingers, but he and Swift convinced me that their ability to squeeze in tries from close range justified their continued selection.
We need to decide whether to use Turner as a centre, where his attack is great but his defence is weak, or in the forwards. I personally see him as a centre, but the signing of Peyroux suggests KC sees Turner as a packman. I don't think his workrate is sufficiently high for the pack. His place in the squad has got to be looking under threat now.
Roby does need more spelling, as we're just not using him properly. His greatest asset is his attack of a broken/retreating line from dummy-half, and he does that very rarely now, because he's usually shagged from making 50 tackles. He needs spelling, and it wouldn't surprise me to see Burns doing this next year.
Walsh still isn't doing enough. I know why, and I don't pretend it's easy, but he has to get back to the form he showed when he first arrived, or he's wasting a salary. I thought in the first 20 minutes of the Leeds game, he showed a willingness to threaten the line, but after that, he became just a catch-and-pass merchant. We can't carry that. I'd like to say that Fages will pressure him for a place, but realistically, he's not going to be dropped on his salary. Somehow, the coaches need to build him back up.
In terms of the leavers, I don't think we lose anything by waving goodbye to Quinlan, who - in the absence of stunning pace or silky skill - is too small to be a pro RL player in my view. Likewise Flanagan never really progressed beyond slow, solid, medium-sized workhorse - the Tim Jonkers of the modern side. Mose takes his enigma with him: on his day, a devastating wrecking ball - you could make an argument that his contribution was the single most important in winning us the title in the final last year. But either we never used him effectively, or he wasn't up to be used. Either way, he hasn't justified the salary overall. A shame. The one we'll potentially miss is Josh Jones. He secured the left flank defensively, and was a good standard for a utility player.
Richards and Thompson look to me like the sort of players who we'll keep on small pay packets as reserves. Hard to see evidence that they'll make it.
Savelio, I'm going to be controversial about : I don't think he's yet showed the form people claim he's capable of. I haven't been particularly impressed. He tends to stop before he hits the line, often turning sideways or even reversing into the collision. Not good enough for a man of his size. He needs to become the wrecking ball, and that means working on some speed into the collision. He also misses too many tackles, and that's largely because he is not laterally mobile, so a lot of those misses are people putting a bit of footwork on him, and then going through his outstretched arm because he can't get his shoulder in front of them. I hope we didn't break the bank to keep him off Warrington, but if we did, he needs the whip cracking a bit.
Greenwood needs to put on some bulk up top. He's a very big lad, and he runs good lines, but he's losing the collision in defence and attack too often. Eat a lot of eggs, Joe.
Dawson, worth keeping as cover.
2. Coaching Set UpClearly Cunningham has been very conservative in his first year, and I, like many others, think that we could have done more with the ball. However, being risk-averse isn't the same as being poor. It's notable, for example, that the coaching team
DID respond to our terrible wide defence, and in the last quarter of the season, that tightened up a lot. That suggests to me that they're capable of diagnosing and reacting to a problem. The problem they next need to tackle is our attack.
We desperately need to find a way to use a wider attack. Saints have easily the most predictable and one-dimensional attack of all the top eight teams. It's also a criminal underuse of Percival, who's our most elusive centre since Lyons.
At the moment, with the exception of a rare-as-hen's-teeth solo linebreak from Swift, opposing teams know that they are simply not going to be tested in defence by Saints anywhere outside their own twenty metre line. As a result, opposing teams have been playing us with a highly compressed defence when we're in our own half, because they know we're not ever going to work it wide, and even if we tried, it'd be amateur and likely to fail. This is one of the reasons why our pack has found it so hard to make metres - they're being met each time by 3 or 4 defenders who are rushing off the line safe in the knowledge that we're not going to exploit any gaps they leave further out.
We also need to work on the offload game. We do have big men who can free their hands, but we have no second-phase attack at all. That should come when we have a class fullback again, but it's also a job for an activist halfback or stand-off.
3. Match OfficialsI've got no real issues here. They make fewer errors per game than the players, and most of those errors are unavoidable without the benefit of a slow-mo replay. Some work for us, some work against us.
4. Projection for 2016.It's really hard to call. If Kirmond signs, alongside Fages, Peyroux and Tasi, then I think we probably make a net gain in quality over the departing Jones, Flanagan, Masoa and Quinlan.
By far the biggest question is fullback though. If Lomax comes back and can still run, then we essentially have the equivalent of a top-class new signing. Plus a possible decent cover for the whole backline in McDonnell. Look on those as new signings and you've definitely got a strengthened squad. However, that's a huge "if". Saints will have to be ruthless with Lomax. If his knees are gone, and he can't do what he previously could, then the club will need to do a Wellens and persuade him to retire, to free up his salary. We don't have size in the threequarters, and we don't have blistering pace either. So it's essential that we have a top-notch fullback.
For me, that's the key. If we can develop a backline attack, then we'll challenge strongly for the prizes next year. But if we don't, and we carry on playing conservative, forward-dominated rugby, then we're going to be semi-final losers again next year, behind the teams who can defend as well as us up the middle, but can do more with the ball out wide.
