I thought we played really well In the first half, very impressed with Gill. The second half they must have had a doing at half time and stepped it up another gear as we struggled with the speed of the game. The thing is for me hopefully we can kick on and have a good season.Roll on Dewsbury!

I see Newcastle were defeated by an equally young Wigan side by a similar score. Maybe we underestimate the gap between Champ clubs and SL youngsters?

It looks to me that if you have a decent academy and you add four or five first teamers to a 17 then you'll have the beating of most championship teams.

Which is why they are keen to bring in 3 Leeds lads on loan, pay v little and hope like hell Leeds don’t suffer injuries and recall them. If Leeds have a relatively injury free season we get 3 decent players costing v little, if they get recalled it’s not cost us financially

O'Connor, Johnson and Mustapha would certainly get in our current 17, I do have some reservations about loans and dual reg if you upset lads who are our permanent signings but it's up to all players to train well enough to get in the side.

Resilient defence in the first half, poor in the second. Gill looks like a good signing.



Appreciate that there have been some improvements to Odsal as part of the stock cars, but overall I don’t think it’s ever been in a worse state. The stands are filthy, the pitch is terrible, the corners are embarrassing and the track being half dug up makes everything look even more amateur.



Speaking of amateur, the weird artificial crowd noise through the speakers needs to go. Was never a fan of playing “We will rock you” when we forced a GLDO but we now seem to play it when we concede a GLDO and at random intervals too. Appreciate the atmosphere is worse than a funeral but the only way we’ll generate any type of atmosphere is by having a good season on the pitch.



Great crowd, would be great if we could get that in a league game but I think we’ll average 2-3k.

Yes it's looks terrible. The pitch is a joke not just the surface but the corners and the lines. There's picture doing the rounds of the dead ball line at the south bank stand end and it's not even straight - never mind the artificial grass corner things.



It doesn't look safe to me.

I think the pitch is just heavy after having 3 consecutive games and it being winter. It was very wet for the Batley game and that made a mess of it.



I agree about the corners, the holes in the track and the dirt. One particularly amateurish thing is the single row of wooden pallets that bridges the tunnel and the pitch. It's covered in mud and looks incredibly shabby. We must be able to do better than that?



I forgot about the "crowd noise" on the PA. Embarrassing.

Watching the Rhys Evans try on Twitter, the pitch looks even worse close up.



I would question whether there has been any maintenance since the end of the season. The run of friendlies and weather won’t have helped though.



Agree regarding the “bridge” to the dressing rooms. Looks like Astro on pallets….. not sure that will stand up to a season of 16 stone blokes walking over it.



Odsal will always have a place in my heart and I’ve argued for years that we should stay. I know there isn’t an alternative anyway, but the whole place is indicative of the fact that we’re not going to get back into SL at any point in the next decade. If we were somehow to have an exceptional season and got promoted (appreciate it would be a miracle) how embarrassing would it be to see that as a “top flight” stadium regularly on Sky Sports?

Odsal has hardly changed at all since the mid 80s. In fact it's worse in some respects. I was reading through some old programme articles from back then and they were saying how unsuitable the ground was for top flight rugby back then - 40 years ago! It's an indictment of the various club owners, the RFL and the city council that the place is in the state it is.

That is crap!

Yes it is, but I think it was taken at the Batley game. The lines looked ok yesterday.

Everything else posted about the ground yesterday is spot on though. All the problems with the small pitch, red gunge, big holes in the track etc etc are down to the stock car track. But Without stock cars we would still be in Dewsbury. Unless there is some secret master plan it looks like we’re stuck with Odsal as it is. For a while anyway.