First 20/25 minutes some of the best rugby I've seen from Fax for a while - then decent defence but very frustrating with ball in hand for next 35 minutes. Keyes looked back to his very best in that first 20 minutes but then faded - thought Crookes head and shoulders above anyone else on the field - definite MOM for me. Inman has some zip out of dummy half but some of his distribution is dire - the team look a LOT better with O'brien on rhe field. Eden maybe not as involved as much as I'd hoped but did some lovely stuff in attack - think him and Crookes will make an excellent combination. Widdop set up a good try brilliantly finished by Salty, but team looked better balanced with its original spine. Wasn't a fan of Davies but he worked his socks off hitting hard in defence and running really strongly, only slight reservation still is his lack of size. Plenty of cause for optimism throughout the team; particularly when you think of the quality of players not selected today.

Totally agree. Crooks MOM by a country mile a week after I wondered how he made the squad. O'Brien does everything just right. Eden showed his class , a top recruit and well done to the board. Sloppy for the middle sixty with the ball but defence strong through out. Calcott just gets better every game. Super kick from Widdop and a quality finish by Salty. Every forward put in a good stint too. Cut out some errors and we will have a team that can challenge the top three.

Similar story to last week, set off at pace playing some great rugby, then seemed to lose our direction with less punch, when we changed our starting props and hooker. Was very difficult for Widdop to get into the game in the 2nd half due to the stop / start nature of it. I still expect that once he's fully fit that will be the back line up, other than JWH might move to centre in pace of Mcomb/Tibbs

Agree with pretty much everything above. We played well for 25 minutes or so overall, the rest was dire and drab. I'm surprised Inman is splitting game time with AOB but that might just be because its early season but like has been said above we are far better with AOB on the pitch. Crooks was the best player on the pitch and his partnership with Eden is going to be fun to watch this season, between them they will score a lot of tries and you can tell they both have that SL class about them. I had started to think that it may be time for a change away from Salty but with him back in the team you can see he is still a class above any other option that we have in that spot.

We are going to need a lot of luck with injuries if we are to make an impact this season but again we will be better once Douglas is back in and hopefully we can get a centre and a couple of good forwards from Leeds as the season goes on. If we do that we can get ourselves in to the play off mix again.

We did start very well, the forwards playing direct and quick making good metres, Keyes taking the line on more and scoring, and Eden and Crooks causing Whitehaven plenty of problems. Both of Crooks tries were well created by Eden who doesn't just take the ball in he is always looking to get someone into space. Barring the last 5 minutes we then went to sleep probably thought job done. Our defense was good but we looked disjointed in that period of the game and the quality of our attack fell away. Woodburn-hall seemed to hurt his hamstring after about 20 minutes and couldn't really offer a running threat from that point on i just hope him playing on until halftime hasn't made it worse. As for the next round i would like to see everyone who didn't play yesterday get a run and put some pressure on some of the established players.