PopTart wrote:
It's funny how perspective can change when you see specific incidents.
I saw Kelepi blowing a bit and thought he was undercooked, and then I saw him miss a tackle that saw Handley run through the defence with ease.
But the stats show he actually made 34 tackles, second only to Crowther and Kay, and is way bigger than his normal stats, including some really big hits. He also made an average gain of 11 metres per carry, which was only second to Handley across both teams.
All the forwards made big numbers in tackles and all made better metres than normal. But unfortunately the missed tackles across the team were high too. Only Fifita and Arona didn't miss any. Purely a positional issue rather than effort. More of an issue was how aggressive Leeds were in defense to us. When we tried to do the same we gave away a penalty. We need to be better at that.
I haven't watched it back yet (too bloody depressed and angry to do so) but as usual it did feel like we were getting pinged for offences that Leeds were allowed to get away with, especially first half. I think the penalty count evened up in the second half but that's no help when you're 5 tries behind.
Not blaming the ref as we were definitely the architects of our own downfall but with some fairer decisions then I think we'd have been in it still at half time.
Also, why wasn't Leemings hit a Red card as it has been in first 3 rounds, and pretty sure there was another hit on Bowes later that should have been a yellow (based on first 3 rounds) but was let off.