Quote ="Winslade's Offload"Wet weather is a great leveller, it disadvantages the runners and play makers and rewards the big forwards. Our game seems to have evolved very much into fast rugby with lots of offloads, breaks, and tries scored from well down the field. Salford rely on forwards scoring from the 10m line, kick throughs and long kicks to the corner. Even their winger Rhys Williams has been converted into a forward and the only time he got the ball in space he looked woefully slow. By and large this season has done us a favour because games are much faster and scrums of course are non existent. In a normal season we would be back to talking about the need for a couple of big forwards.
As well as (or perhaps because of) the conditions we made a lot of errors, some of which were pretty basic stuff. As previously predicted, Ashton had a bad day and invited the kick through for one of their tries. On the plus side we took the two points that were on offer and in the first half pinned them in their own half for good long periods (which I would guess to be our tactics surely ?) Unfortunately after that we seemed to lose the plot whilst Salford simply ground on and never gave up.
Well done Salford, but I don't think we need to start making a noose from the light flex just yet.'"
Sensible analysis. We played the conditions for about 30 of the 80 minutes. In the other 50 we were impatient and over-optimistic. This is disappointing as both Wire and Salford had seen the way Leeds handled the weather and it seems that Salford payed closer attention. This is down to execution by the players and not to coaching. We will need to be much smarter from this lesson as October is the 2nd rainiest month in the UK (after January) so we may see more of these conditions in other vital matches.
