Their forwards more than matched ours and in the second half Roden ran the show. Their line speed and speed of play the ball was better than ours as was their defensive line. We looked like a different team to the one that played Swinton. They constantly tried to put our man on his back and we didn't appear to try. A lot of their tackles bordered on holding down, but they played to the ref as we should have done.
In the first half they built pressure on the back of penalties as did we. It appeared that penalties were the only things separating the two sides. After they scored the first try in the second half their increased confidence allowed them to kick on and we just ended up playing catch up rugby.
The ref made a couple of blunders, the main one sin binning our man but not sin binning them for repeat offences dispite a warning. Both teams should have had one man off for 10 mins. Apart from that I thought he just reffed what he saw. If you stand offside or rip the ball out you should expect to get penalised. Having said that I would like to see the Buster incident again, I'm not sure it was as bad as made out.
With regard to the penalty try, we have seen in superleague that if you swing an arm to dislodge the ball but miss and make contact with the head you are penalised. Without seeing it in slow motion its difficult to say exactly what happened but I don't think we were trying to "take their players head off".
They were the better side by some distance.
