2 games in and it looks like Toulouse and Featherstone will be in the mix for promotion whilst there's a group of about 8 sides who look like they can beat each other on the day, including dare I say, us!

If we're serious about making strides towards SL on the field, then games like this one need to be closer than last years nilling at the Shay. IIRC, fax were only beaten 3 times at home last season and will be confident of winning, but can we upset them?

Anyone going up?

Will be interesting to see how Fax come out for it. They looked pretty poor against Fev so will no doubt want to prove a point.

And now Henry Raiwalui slips quietly out of the Friday 21-man squad. Replaced by the previously injured Dalton Grant. Grant is probably not yet fit, but I doubt we will find out either way as he's unlikely to make the match day 17.

Think they are carrying some injuries so we could get a result. Most likely a home win though as they have been pretty consistent over last few years. Hopefully we put a decent patch of form together and can the. Build on that in home game against Sheffield.

Odd and also that we are reliant on three really late in the day loanees. The PNG signing, William, still hasn’t come over one assumes.
I hear what Eccles has said about “culture” etc but I can’t help but feel this is a sub-optimal approach. If preseason means anything the surely you want to bed players in preseason.
On the plus side the squad does look pretty settled. Now whether that is settled and strong or just stronger (than last year) for being settled I don’t know. My gut is the latter but how far up the table that gets us is not clear ...which makes it more exciting than last year for sure when it was pretty obvious we had gone down the wrong road.

Another loss unfortunately.

Thought we were going to get pasted when Fax got 24-6 ahead.
Wasn’t at the game but presumably we showed a bit of fight/ created and took a couple of chances late on ?

Points difference could be important so good we had enough about us to have clawed a few tries back. Bit worried Swinton picking up wins early doors was hoping they might be one who finish below us. Seems they haven’t read the script. Noticed also a few have got dual reg arrangements going on which will help them when the get thin on numbers. More difficult for us.

Scoreline was closer than last year, so that's a plus. I hope we can hang on to the wigan youngsters and maybe add a few more, because looking at our squad, we are really light on numbers.
On the Eccles and "right culture" comments....sigh.....what were the club actually doing in October, November, December and January? I take it that some staff continued to be paid, but what for? We've recruited very few, didn't get the new coaches, have struggled to find a proper sponsor and the only "achievement' appears to be buying 2 new horse costumes and switching stands.

Only seen highlights on twitter. Couple of observations, macani has very little clue on what his position is when defending, 2 tries due to him being in the wrong place, same against Batley.
The runaway try, at least we didn't give up on the chase, ironically think it was macani.
Worry about next week