General thoughts
Trial games are always a case of what are you looking to get out of them. If you're looking for a polished, finished performance you're probably setting yourselves up for a disaster. We had a good hit out, definitely got outplayed, but we got a reasonable conditioning hit out despite the repeated stoppages that didn't bring an interchange despite an unlimited interchange day.
Lack of green card
I didn't ask whether it was going to be used in any of the trial games but I believe it was agreed it wasn't going to be used. But that doesn't stop the fact there was a big, lengthy stoppage and we're going into a year that's critical for our game. We had one injury (Kruise Leeming) where the referee decided to stop the game eventually because we decided we wanted to carry on as in a trial match you want conditioning and the ball in play. You don't hear much from the RFL over the Winter.
Lack of cohesion in attack
I think there were four play-one errors in the first half. You can't get any cohesion or flow. There was an attempt to do what we set out to do but you make errors and overplay your hand. We know how we want to attack, we didn't execute it today, we've to find the right balance between patience and passing the ball. But overall I thought we looked physically pretty good, we didn't look too tired at many stages and defensively I thought we tackled effectively aside from inside our ten when we let them play the ball too quickly and they scored from barge overs. That will be attended to.
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They're practice games, so we are practising what we set out to do. It's always about finding the right balance between passing and not. We had a couple of play-the-ball errors which is nothing about being expansive. We hardly had a play-the-ball error at the back end of last year but we had a couple today, one last week and one the week before. We'll be playing the ball a lot this week.
Was he hoping the execution levels would be higher despite it being a trial game?
I'd expect that it would be, but today's execution means nothing for next week's execution. We'll practice lots of things this week and we'll have to be a lot better against a very aggressive and willing Warrington team that clearly showed what they're going to be about last night.
Why David Fusitu'a came off just after half-time
We were just chatting as half-time finished and he just had a bit of a bump. It was his first game, he was quite frustrated with me after the game so I took that as a good sign that he wasn't too busted.
The Aidan Sezer sin-bin
You could see the divot in the ground where he fell over, like almost everybody when they changed direction today. He's maybe less than half his normal height when his head hits Aidan's arm, and not only was it a complete accident, he apologised then there's a whole heap of carry-on. If that's what our game got to that we're going to have a push and shove for that type of tackle, it's quite concerning. It's a practice game so is that a sin-bin? I haven't looked at the reply of Richie Myler's (when he got high tackled) but he was fine so what are we doing putting people in the bin if they're not legit? In a practice game particularly, we're not using the green card but we're using the yellow card.
James McDonnell's absence
He's been ill the last few days, he's desperate to play. He'd have played with a fever of 40 but it wasn't a smart play so we stood him down.
Derrell Olpherts' injury latest
He's got a few things just to check out but we're expecting that he will be back in full training sometime soon and we'll take it as it comes after that.
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