Cougars v 'fax 1 June : Tue May 27, 2014 7:55 pm  

Looking forward to a good old fashioned derby on Sunday at our 'traditional' and atmospheric ground and welcoming the 'fax people to Cougar Park. Get down early - real ale and bar opens out onto the terracing.

How many do you reckon you will bring and who'll win by how many points?

Bit surprised about how negative you all are about Karl Harrison. He had us well organsied and playing pretty attractive rugby before Br**f**d poached him off us. But guess he wasn't here long in the scheme of things.

We only lost to Leigh in funny circumstances in the last minute - so we're hoping for a top 6 finish this year and a Cougars v fax grand final at Headingley would be good.

Look out for Marchy peering in from the car wash outside the ground!

Re: Cougars v 'fax 1 June : Tue May 27, 2014 9:11 pm  

LOL!:-) As poor as we've been we should still bring 500/600 fans. As for the result I haven't a clue after watching us this season but I wlll go for Cougars 14v26 Fax. As for the real ale I will go for The Boltmakers, a great little pub. Mmm!

Re: Cougars v 'fax 1 June : Tue May 27, 2014 9:21 pm  

Cougars 28 Fax 12

Plenty of ex-Fax players in their squad to step up and cause us more pain this season.

Re: Cougars v 'fax 1 June : Tue May 27, 2014 9:36 pm  

Yep, close again and up for grabs.

Coming off the fence.

Fax hurting from Dewsbury and double busting for a win, 16 - 26 to Fax with a good few hundred coming over.

Re: Cougars v 'fax 1 June : Wed May 28, 2014 9:04 am  

Faxcar, I wish I shared your optimism but until something changes I do not see us winning another game, there is something fundamentally wrong within either the team or the club and it needs fixing. Losing to Dewsbury who are an upward moving team I can take but NW was not acceptable.
What needs to be fixed I really don't know but it needs sorting now.
Hope I'm wrong and we put 50 past them, we shall see.

Re: Cougars v 'fax 1 June : Wed May 28, 2014 12:02 pm  

The frustrating thing (apart from the style of rugby) is the fact that we've got FIVE bonus points. That's FIVE matches that we potentially could have won had we possessed a killer instinct. That Leigh second half was a shambles but it's one that I remarked at half time that we could still lose - and we stuck to the script and lost. There's no expectations anymore that we will send the opposition back home disappointed.

Re: Cougars v 'fax 1 June : Wed May 28, 2014 12:11 pm  

littlerich wrote:

The frustrating thing (apart from the style of rugby) is the fact that we've got FIVE bonus points. That's FIVE matches that we potentially could have won had we possessed a killer instinct. That Leigh second half was a shambles but it's one that I remarked at half time that we could still lose - and we stuck to the script and lost. There's no expectations anymore that we will send the opposition back home disappointed.

Carrying on from that if we finished third we will be disapointed, if by some chance we beat Fev and finished second we would be delighted, yet the same brand of Rugby will have been played. If we win the Grand Final?
So how do you judge a season, by what you win or how you play?

Re: Cougars v 'fax 1 June : Wed May 28, 2014 12:47 pm  

I think you can justify the style of play if you win things but not if
you come up short.IMO the game at Dewsbury was more exciting
than watching the 76-42 games a few years ago.What i fail to understand
is why we play 5 drives when we don't have any forwards who can break
tackles or offload.Surely a change of style is a no-brainer.As an aside a poster
on here lst week predicted that goalkicking would cost us a game shortly.He was proved right in the next game.There seems to be only one person who can't see the blinding obvious.

Re: Cougars v 'fax 1 June : Wed May 28, 2014 1:30 pm  

My honest answer HJ.

Probably winning is more important if I had to choose for the club as a whole especially this year with the extra cash on offer.

As MTH has said if that means grinding out the result that gets the result fair enough but not when it consistently comes up short.

Maybe during the early months when the pitches are heavy.

Sooner or later though there must be some attacking exciting rugby along the way as the pitches dry out when the grinding out a result becomes out of place with the environment.

The team should be able to spark it up.

I wonder if it's more of a case that KH plays two conservative from a sort of fear of taking risks rather than not knowing how to play a more expansive game, surely he can't be that off the mark after all these years in the game.

A lot of what he seems to do is laced with caution, caution and more caution.

Time for a balanced approach you can't just throw caution to the wind like we did with MC but time to take the shackles off and try to play a bit.

We need that offload in the tackle in the right areas of the pitch, we need that chip over the top occasionally otherwise we are just running the ball in against a set defence instead of a broken line.

The frustrating thing is on the odd occasions we have done we can take teams apart, it's not like we are asking for something that isn't there.

Come on KH let the lads out of their box.

Re: Cougars v 'fax 1 June : Wed May 28, 2014 3:15 pm  

Im not buying the pitch thing. Two prime examples were the Dewsbury game but more so the Workington game. In both those games our opposition showed probably more flair than we have for most of the season. Why do they stand out? Both games were played in bogey conditions, especially the Workington game, conditions that our coach says we cant play expansive rugby in.