The game was lost yesterday because of three main reasons.
(1) The outside backs as a group were hopeless at defending.
Denny Solomona made 1 tackle. Given that the line was broken at least 11 times (for 9 tries and 2 disallowed) we were effectively playing without a last line of defence. He is recorded as missing 3 tackles and was nowhere to be seen elsewhere. He should be moved back to wing where he was not terrible.
Jamie O'Callaghan made 2 tackles and missed 5 with a tackle completion rate of 28.57%. Whilst he was the only player out of our backline to make a clean break he did not score. Given his record of less than 1 try/1 win per 5 games played he is not of the standard required. A better player is required.
Iliess Macani made 9 tackles and missed 3 tackles with a tackle completion rate of 75%. It was surprising to see him on the wing when he was arguably our man of the match at fullback against Leeds. I’d swap him back with Solomona that is for sure. He has potential.
Mason Caton Brown made 14 tackles and missed 5 tackles with a tackle completion rate of 73.68%. He looks impressive going forward having made 16 line breaks this season but he suffers from the general slow line speed in the team.
Of the outside backs only Mike McMeeken was impressive. He made 32 tackles with just 1 miss yesterday. This was one more tackle than all our other backs combined. James Woodburn Hall also did ok with 6 tackles and 0 misses.
(2) The playmakers created minimal opportunity as they have all season.
Ben Farrar made just 33 metres and kicked the ball twice and did not offload once plus missed 4 tackles with 17 made. He has created almost nothing from stand-off to date. He has created 2 tries this season.
Josh Drinkwater made 64 metres and kicked the ball eight times, mainly finding touch or the ball going straight to the fullback and missed 3 tackles with 17 made, but offloaded twice. He has created 0 tries this season
The only useful playmaker looks to be Scott Moore who has created 7 tries this season from Hooker and is making around 90 metres a game and 30 tackles. However he gives a couple of penalties away per game and misses about 1 in 10 tackles.
(3) The team are making about 30-50% less metres than the opposition with the teams average being around 1000-1100 metres to the 1500-1600 elsewhere.
I can understand it being difficult to topple players like Carney. What is unacceptable is when small men – being of no more than 14 stones – and not blessed with lightning speed are able to make huge swathes of metres. Michael Channing and James Clare made 10 line breaks between them and several hundred metres.
If we look at the team our backs are only really making metres from kick returns and about 2 clean breaks and 1 try per game between them all. This is nowhere good enough; surely a back must have a bit of speed, a step, a hand off or something that would take them past an opponent.
In the forwards the stats are not bad, although a slow play the ball and 5 to 6 metres won't generally be enough.
We have got to get the ball in the hands of the likes of Matt Cook, Vea and Greenwood who are the stronger runners.
Foster should never run the ball in whilst I would use Krasniqi also a purely defensive Prop.
Of the other forwards there are a few making only 50 metres per game when Andy Lynch made three times that on his own.
I would play as the team: Macani, Solomona, Farrar, McMeeken, Caton-Brown, Moore, Drinkwater, Greenwood, Cunningham, Krasniqi, Cook, Vea, Foster
The thing is for me, most of these players are relatively unproven but they have been on TV twice in a week and started to prove they are not good enough and in some cases also without the effort required to play for any team in Super League or the NRL. They may not care about us as a club but they are in my view making themselves a prime contender to play in the lower leagues.
I think the 51st to the 56th minutes were the worst I have ever seen given that we were about 30-0 down and then leaked three consecutive tries. This was a steaming pile of mediocrity.
I do not subscribe to the view that collapsing week after week is acceptable. It is not.
