It was a marked difference in his performance imo.
For all of Lam's talk of "play what you see", he's not been the guy to bring out the best in JB.
Is that mainly as a result of injuries? He was probably given the #13 shirt for a reason. Our SR has been playing at centre so has been playing right SR.
We can cover 1 or 2 of our back line quite comfortably but not 4.
2 weeks ago Hardaker fully deserved to keep the FB spot. French should now move to FB, Hardaker to centre, Farrell or Isa to SR and Bateman to 13. Doesn’t solve the prop problem but fixes up quite a few other issues.
Is that mainly as a result of injuries? He was probably given the #13 shirt for a reason. Our SR has been playing at centre so has been playing right SR.
We can cover 1 or 2 of our back line quite comfortably but not 4.
2 weeks ago Hardaker fully deserved to keep the FB spot. French should now move to FB, Hardaker to centre, Farrell or Isa to SR and Bateman to 13. Doesn’t solve the prop problem but fixes up quite a few other issues.
I'm genuinely not sure.
I have a feeling that if we had our 1st choice back row, JB wouldn't be at LF. He'd have Isa there, playing the Partington role.
At the end of the day 'The prop problem' has been of our own making for years now. Probably going back to SW's early years, by allowing a small mobile pack get away with the hard work in attack, by allowing the backs to drive the ball in one man rugby from deep on 4 of our 5 tackles in a set.
It's boring. It's old hat. Its not winning us trophies anymore.
The club have only themselves to blame for allowing this recruitment policy and tactics to continue for so long. Last seasons GF should have been over by half time (but for our brutal line in defence, such was the % possession against).
We’ve got two options to my mind if we want to get better for next season-
1-get some big, no nonsense, hard to pull down middle forwards in.
Or
2-bring Wane back to jump in full throttle regards playing that low risk, high intensity rugby.
We’ve gone half and half since Wane has left. If you want to move away from one style of play and go to another, don’t go half measures by bringing in a head man but keeping the old coaches background team on. Who does that nowadays? We’ve done it because it’s cheap (and that’s fine this past 12 months but not before) Wire are clearing the full coaching team out and bringing all the Cas guys with Powell and likewise Cas are moving the full lot on and bringing a new team in. We’ve also stuck to signing similar style players to what Wane could work with since he left. You can see that whilst the coach is different, the guys making the recruitment decisions haven’t amended who they’re looking for. If they’re not flexible then get the right coach in to work with the players you have.
We’ve got two options to my mind if we want to get better for next season-
1-get some big, no nonsense, hard to pull down middle forwards in.
Or
2-bring Wane back to jump in full throttle regards playing that low risk, high intensity rugby.
We’ve gone half and half since Wane has left. If you want to move away from one style of play and go to another, don’t go half measures by bringing in a head man but keeping the old coaches background team on. Who does that nowadays? We’ve done it because it’s cheap (and that’s fine this past 12 months but not before) Wire are clearing the full coaching team out and bringing all the Cas guys with Powell and likewise Cas are moving the full lot on and bringing a new team in. We’ve also stuck to signing similar style players to what Wane could work with since he left. You can see that whilst the coach is different, the guys making the recruitment decisions haven’t amended who they’re looking for. If they’re not flexible then get the right coach in to work with the players you have.
On the button there I think. My fear is even if Lam is moved on, we take the cheap option in Winder.
You can’t really blame Lammy. Clubb crucially left Wigan light to fight a bigger FC team. Wigan have the arsenal to damage any team, but lacked the heavy guns to soften them up first. If there is blame to be had, it’s at Clubb. Similarly but not identical, you couldn’t blame Wane for losing the GF after the Ben Flower incident.
It was all there to see v FC the week before, being such a tight game, any slight deviation from that margin could swing the result one way to another. There was a time when Wigan would go straight into the market and buy themselves out of a dilemma, the likes of Fielden.