To be fair, I thought the first half we did well (Swift's mistakes excepted). We built pressure, dominated the ground, and had their pack under the cosh. Forwards were running good lines and Walsh was hitting them with good ball. In fact, I thought those tactics were the right ones against Cas, because Cas's threequarters are on average significantly bigger and faster than ours, and with Webster and Shenton very strong defensive centres, Percival and Turner were never going to get much space. Maybe if we had Makinson out there, you'd have spun it out a bit more, but with Swift and Dawson, any passing move to the wings was going to end up in touch - as it did several times. We have a problem at Saints in that our backs are very small and not very fast compared to most SL teams. Only Turner has size, but he's more of a tank than a racing car, and even the smaller ones are not particularly fast, as we've seen several times this season when our lads have just been completely unable to catch up a whole range of ball-carriers even over long distances. We keep it in the forwards because that's where our relative strength is, and that works most of the time.
The loss in the second half came about because Cas's pack got back on top of our forwards. We were struggling to make yards, and their kick returns were much stronger than ours. We were quite lucky to still be in it with 5 minutes to go, particularly as our discipline was terrible. Those penalties for holding down were just stupid. Getting caught offside when you've got your opponents stuck in their twenty should be an automatic fine for the player concerned from the club management, in my view - it's just unprofessional. LMS must have given away at least 4 penalties on his own. And of course Saints had a collective brainfart of the sort I haven't seen for some time : Swift robbing the ball rather than just holding it while the carrier went into touch (I hope he's ok, but he had a shocker tonight - absolute shocker); LMS annoying the officials with his gamesmanship, which included taking a winning situation when he won the ball from the drop-out, and turning it into a losing situation by dicking about instead of playing the ball; Roby's butterfingers at the scrum; Burns's kick to gift Holmes 80 metres; Percival's completely unnecessary and obvious sin-bin-worthy flop, and so on. Properly rubbish. Cunningham needs to give them a kick up the backside.
These games happen, from time to time. As long as they don't happen too often, then it's ok. Ugly and frustrating to watch, though.
