Thought we were Ok. Defence was largely good but, yeah we would possibly have been better with Webster and Evans at centre, but they weren't there and the players who were played creditably. Our attack looked sharp on occasion, not least on the Rowan Milnes try, and against a team which is a country mile better than any other in this division, we were good enough to bode well for the rest of the season.
Bring on the Rhinos, another game where playing well and not winning can appear in the same sentence, get the cup out of the equation and kick on for the rest of the year.

I think we will shock the Rhinos.

There is a real spirit in the team. At 16-0 down I thought we were onto a hiding. But we dug deep and were just beaten by a better team at the end of the day. Agreed about Minchella being wasted at centre, though I did think Mikey Wood had a great game. Got another 3 fixtures coming up where we have to put in an effort like that.

Nah. They'll beat us but if we play like that again then at least we'll give them a good game and keep it respectable.

Thought we turned up really well yesterday. Great defence for most part. Need to work on wings a bit as our wingers got sucked in a few times leaving a overlap which Toronto exploited to score. Generally s much better performance than I was expecting.

Nowt would shock me right now. Run at our markers and one-out defenders and you'll be good for 4 or 5 tries. Everyone else is.

Thought you went well yesterday and am looking forward to next week.

[quote="Nothus"]Despite the loss I think that's up there with the best we've played all season. Fantastic defense, a very high completion rate and we even looked relatively competent with ball in hand!
There were cutout passes! Dummy runners! Offloads! We even scored a try from further than 40 yards out!

If we can play like that every week we will win a lot more games than we lose and I will be a very happy bunny.[/quote]

100% spot on

I think that realistically we are in the Championship for the forseeable future due to the triple threat of the SL pulling up the drawbridge, the new expansion teams that can throw money at squads and also newly relegated teams such as Widnes that can hold onto their SL squad. However the competition in this division seems a lot more even. Would people be happier in this division winning more matches but finishing third or fourth?

The problem with this line of thinking is our current owner, like the last one, has set the club up with the aim of being in SL. It's the reason JK quit his comfortable desk job at Wakey in order to be a head coach once more.Our current set up is not sustainable long term in this division. If we were to accept long term championship rugby then we'd have to go part time losing all our best players and then be competing with the rest of the league for the same journeymen. The academy would have to be downgraded and we'd have to accept that any players we produce, that had any potential above been a part time player, would leave at the first opportunity. The fanbase would shrink along with our income ( we'd have to reduce the high ticket prices )and we'd have no better chance of being a top four championship club as any other in this league.

I thought for where we are in our rebuilding, and first time round in the Championship, it was a very creditable performance. Toronto are very good and improving, and yet knew they had been in a game.

To me, the major difference between the two teams was the tactic that Toronto had obviously decided upon, and that is to attack at all costs and tire us out. It worked, because the lopsided score at the end was the result of them having taken so much petrol out of our tank, and even then we didn't collapse, but scoring became easier as gaps appeared.

the most noticeable factor for me, and which led o us spending large parts of the game trying vainly to get out of our own half, was the simple tactic of running hard after a quick PTB, AND having two or 3 men running close to the ball carrier. This we found hard to cope with, and our one man drives contrasted very poorly with it. Whether we don't have the personnel to regularly send at least a couple of players sprinting with the ball carrier to stretch the defence, I don't know, but it made it very clear that Toronto were in charge, and overall, were a lot more threatening and got a shedload of far better field position.

But like I say, I thought we coped with it pretty well, it was a very stern test and should stand us in good stead for the coming games. We gave them about a 50% better game than I feared we might. A full squad with everyone playing in position would have been interesting.