Today's game vs Swinton : Sun Mar 01, 2009 4:16 pm  

I enjoyed today's game....even though we were a bit slack down the middle.
Josh Weeden.........top man.
COYD

: Sun Mar 01, 2009 5:00 pm  

Not the best game thought Josh had a good game also the trialist Al Rounding played well. Bauer appeared to ease thro the game ok.


Picked up a couple of injuries Scott Jones & China .

Looking forward to next Saturday and hopefully will see Handforth.

[Jemmo]

: Mon Mar 02, 2009 8:51 am  

Saw Scott at the leeds game with a far few stitches in his nose

: Mon Mar 02, 2009 9:12 am  

Well a wins a win but after seeing two matches now, I think my fears are closer to reality than Id hoped.

We have a very young side and it shows yesterday they were out enthused and largely outplayed by an experienced and determined Swinton side.

We were lucky to win, Swinton bombed 2 clear tries. Our defense was shocking up the middle how many clean breaks did they make up there? We stood and waited for them to come to us rather than getting up in there faces like they were doing to us.

Our attack was flat, rarely did you see someone hitting the ball at pace, they only time I can recall it happening was the pass to Speake that led to Weedons second try. We rarely pass the ball out of the tackle its lots of barge and grunt at times. Swinton made the ball do the work how many of there tries (most of which were better worked than ours) can from a slipped pass in the tackle to the supporting players?

I think we need to locate a recognised fullback soon Scott Jones isnt quite ready and Leaf who is usually Mr Dependable is making some daft errors there atm. Cookie needs to loose about 2 stone by the look of him while he has the rugby brain he's lacking his pace at the moment.

Hopefully Hanforth will give us the drive and direction that Hulse gave Swinton today. I am glad Holly wasnt playing for them as he'd have had a field day.

To only win against a struggling NL2 side by a margin of 8 points doesnt bode well for the coming season, not when we have difficult games at Widnes, Halifax, Leigh etc etc.

Of course all will be rosy after next week after the expected win over queens and then a couple of weeks off until the season proper kicks off.

Looking at the fixtures I really cannot see another league win until Batley at home I will be overjoyed if im proved wrong but I just cannot see it without a shakeup, yes its early, yes there still gelling, but surely im not the only person who thinks were woefully weak, infact were a weaker side by far than last years side.

Its going to be a long hard season without some signings and some changes, we need some experience.

: Mon Mar 02, 2009 11:28 am  

Well just about everyone I spoke to was miserable about our prospects...........I'm not.
Let's wait until we are getting embarrassed week in week out before we go slashing our wrists eh?
COYD

[Wanderer]

: Mon Mar 02, 2009 12:18 pm  

Tony Miller was very honest about it in his after-match speech. He accepted that we hadn't played that well and gave Swinton credit for getting off to a good start and making life difficult for us.

Whilst he thought the team performance wasn't great he did believe that there were one or two good individual performances notably Josh Weedon and Kyle Briggs.

I would personally agree that it wasn't a great performance, our defence down the middle being absolutely shocking at times but we played poorly and still won. We were too reliant on Kyle Briggs for creativity and that made us easier to defend against at times yesterday than should be the case. Hopefully Paul Handforth will ease Kyle's burden.

Last season we had any number of creative players (Briggs, Gale, Wood, Lawrie & Luisi) to put doubt and hesitation into the minds of opposition defenders but as yet we have not had as many available / able to do that this season.

Its not all doom and gloom though ... we have won our last three matches and have a fixture next week which should be there for the taking if approached correctly.

Come on you Dons.