Re: CC Widnes v Saints Match thread. : Sun Apr 15, 2012 8:57 am
The important thing is we are in the hat for the next round. We did what we went there to do and for that we should be satisfied.But let's not pull any punches here, it was a dreadful performance from start to finish. Widnes are a dreadful side, their defensive pattern is poor and they aren't particularly difficult to defend against IMO. Alot of the tries we conceded were pathetic, there were some shambolic one on one defending, poor options picked defensively and some lazy marker defence. We allowed Jon Clarke to dictate the ruck at times, which tells you how poor we were! We conceded 28 points in the 2nd half to the worst side in SL and the 1st two tries conceded in the 1st half weren't great from our perspective either. If we take Roby out of our team yesterday we'd have lost that game as practically every player bar him put in a below par or very poor display. Offensively, we picked the wrong option time and time again, our structure seemed to disappear and we made alot of basic errors. Our kicking game was the worst part of our performance, neither Lomax or Hohaia took any real control. Both our long and short kicking game was shocking and we never really pressurised Widnes with our kicking game. It was a dreadful performance individually and as a team and we cannot afford to play that badly again this season. Any other SL team would've beat us yesterday on that showing.
I understand the easter period takes it out of the players and I expected a poor standard game with some tiredness creeping in, but I didn't expect to witness that. It was up there with the Bradford display in terms of poor quality.
The players need to rest for the next few days and come back and expect some hard work, we need to be better than this Friday otherwise Widnes might sting us this time.
