Snaggletooth wrote:
Cats playing away from home are beatable by any team in the league so why should we struggle, Widnes finished bottom of the pile and should be treated as such, I am only thinking that Leigh may put up a fight, but even they are a team we should be beating. This is a new comp now and as such we should be full of confidence that we will be successful!!
I think the problem is the fact that if you look at the squad we had at the start of the year, you would have said that there was no chance whatsoever that we would have fallen into the bottom 4 - but we did. Now looking at the games in the new division you could say that there is no chance of us losing to sides like Widnes and Cats at home, unfortunately you only need some bad refereeing decisions, or bad luck, or nerves, or a critical injury, or Widnes / Catalans playing out of their skins, to lose these sorts of matches. Then team confidence falls and anything can happen.
One of the problems is the Middle 4's competition is designed purely to pull in more spectators. In doing so it risks a club finishing 9th actually dropping into the Championship. Now you could say that will never happen, Wire are far to good to go down. Unfortunately we saw with the old format Leeds finishing only 5th in the league but winning the GF - again, it shouldn't have happened. But in trying to get more spectators (by making the playoffs include most of the teams in the league), the RFL risked it happening, and we all know the outcome - they had to scrap that format and try this new one instead.