It's basic coaching to target the weakest link.

A lot of good insight above I think. When everything goes thro' Deacon at first receiver we don't look anywhere near as threatening, Jefferies defers and isn't as effective, much prefer him to be in the key position. Deacon's also been targeted throughout the season and it looks as though the cumulative effect is starting to tell and it's becoming an obvious part of the opposition gameplan. Jefferies/Sykes was far more difficult to read.



Otherwise our forwards were not at the races, Lynch and Burgess put in reasonable stints, but Scruton and Koppy were both ineffective, although neither were given much opportunity because of slow distribution from dummy half. Halley wasn't at his best either, and as red points out was out of position twice at crucial moments. I think Platt would have been the better choice today at FB (he's till getting grief without just cause in my book), although hindsight is a wonderful thing.



I expect the gameplan was - wet weather, conservative approach, knock out the sets, play the percentages and grind them down, get field position then run a couple of set moves and bob's your uncle. Once Celtic scored and their forwards were holding their own we looked bereft of ideas. Second half we should have upped the intensity, but we still played like we assumed we'd get back into it, ithout anyone knuckling down and maintaining concentration or discipline long enough for us to make that happen. Some should tell the players that if you catch the ball from a kick-off with your foot planted over the line, it's better than catching it on tippy toes a foot in front of the line and then stepping backwards!



Ah well, onwards and sidewards...

Hmm. Went to bed with it at 4-nil, thinking 'Well, we were losing to Salford at one point before putting 96 on them'. That said, not really that surprised to see the eventual scoreline. And definitely not surprised to see RAB suddenly abuzz with activity.





I take some small consolation in the cluelessness of our guest from Huddersfield who doesn't seem to have noticed that his side mustered all of four points at home to Salford, and that my Haligonian pal that is crashing on my utilty room floor will not be able to gloat too hard as the result means the death of his flatcapper dream, a winless first season for the Crusaders. But I imagine that is little in the face of watching what sounds like a pretty abject performance in the rain with 7,000 other (last two wins not bringing them back you will note).



Where from here? Tough to say. The previously mentioned Huddersfield result provides a little context, as does the season - thirteen games, nine settled by a single score. Win all those and we'd be top or near as damnit. Lose them all and we're just shy of rock bottom. As it is we're somewhere in the middle, though sadly nearer the latter.



Meh. On my way to work. First kid that mentions the scoreline's on litter duty.

Why does it. Also any way you look at it it's 9 points from a possible 26 and that's just not good enough.

What does 'not good enough' mean? Seriously?

It means that a team that on paper that is should be good enough to be in the top 4 shouldn't be sat 11th in the league after half a season.

It means, 7 pages later, red is finally agreeing with my OP and quoting my words of wisdom.

What do you think it means?

Outside the playoffs by several points. What do you think it means?

I honestly can't recall seeing a back 3 (Platt played most of the game at wing) run sideways so much. I don't think it would have made much difference who was where.



That said, I think that Burgess, Lynch and to a lesser extent Sykes (if for his massive tackles alone) are the only ones who deserve credit today. Oh, and Worrincy who looked head and shoulders above the likes of Langley and Cook in terms of effort, enthusiasm, strong running and the lines that he kept trying to produce off a flat, slow attack.

why did we wait so long to bring worrincy on? every time he touched ball he was dangerous yet we waited till latter stages of game to introduce him. We've got to revert to sykes/jeffries pairing next week assuming nero is fit. deacon brought absolutely nothing to the game except short penalty kicks and poor passes. we look much better with jeffries at halfback and sykes doing all the kicking.

At the start of the season Worrincy didnt look much more than a squad player, it wasnt really surprising that he didnt get much game time. Over the last few weeks though he's looked like our most dangerous attacking option, along with Menzies. I dont understand why he isnt being utilised more.



Hopefully the conditioning staff are going through the dietary supplements to discover the rogue batch of valium that somehow got mixed up with the multivitamins.

It is a phrase that is used a lot but I just wonder where does it get us. I mean, take 2003. Clearly no one would say that things 'weren't good enough' that year in retrospect (plenty said so at various points through the year). But despite it being 'good enough', would you expect the coaching and playing staff to work any less hard. And so flip it around, what does 'not good enough' mean? Not much on its own. It needs to be coupled with '...and what needs to be done is... <insert>'. What is it that should be done?

Quite simply, the board (and a fair few on here) seem to believe that we have the right man for the job and that we should trust him. He has also recruited the players that he believes are the right men for the job and, as such by association, the board should feel happy with also. They have trusted their man to recruit the players he wants to make us a competitive side.



But, we sit 11th in the table. Two great wins have papered over the cracks that are quite obvious to many.



IF the coach thinks we have the squad to compete in SL and the board ARE sure that the coach is the man to take us forward, then 11th in the league, dwindling crowds and an embarrassing defeat against the leagues' whipping boys is not good enough I would suggest?

Well, we have a situation where a bit like a rubber ball, we reach reasonable heights like beating Rhinos, and away at Saints, but now all too predictably crash back all the way to the floor, to a performance where we have woeful halfback play (which I mention first because if both your halfbacks are absent then you are in a position to struggle from the off), woeful kicking game, lack of respect for the ball/ coughing it up / knocking on / dropping it etc., at times an extremely lethargic and disinterested, "leave-it-to-you" defence and similar flat, uninspired attack, culminating in annoyingly predictable match-affecting balls-ups in the last minutes of each half.



Or to put it shorter - déjà vu. And the fact that we seem to reserve the worst of it for our home games is key, because it is one thing the faithful going home with that "we lost to a better team, oh well" feeling, but all too many times we go home really fscked off not so much with the result, but with the déjà vu débâcle (love this French stuff!) of the way the players have, in the main, performed.



Now here's the thing. They ain't coached to play like that. Mac says so. The players say so. They can't understand why sometimes we revert to this turgid, error-strewn, unenthusiastic mode (when we have amply demonstrated that our team which "on paper" is definitely good enough, can, when it wants, reach the sort of standard which "on paper" suggests). Nobody knows the answer. Nobody understands it. Mac says so. The players say so.



So, the obvious answer is to watch a tape of the game, analyse each player, and drop all - every one - who did not perform anywhere near the standards he should. Also drop all - every one - who did not follow the game plan which the coach and players trained to do.



This I suspect might not leave many available for the next game, and so what we [ishould[/i do is, in fact, impossible - unless you do a Saints and play the reserves / academy next time out. I'm never one for throwing youngsters to the lions, but what else is there?



Whether you love him or hate him, I've said before that it seems clear to me that McNamara has for some time now been Dead Man Walking, he's even had the dreaded vote of confidence, but I imagine got a stay of execution due to the last couple, especially the Saints game. The thing is, and again I'm repeating myself, in any sports club, what can you do? You can't sack the team, and you can't buy, buy, buy half another team.



The chief responsibility, in this case, rests with the players, who have admitted as much. More than once. And there's little, in reality, that we can do about that. I reckon we will now spin out the rest of the season with what we've got, unless unexpectedly some better alternative appears on the horizon.



I really don't think there's much we [ican[/i "do". All the players and the coaching staff share the responsibility (statement of obvious) but to me, if the halfback situation isn't sorted out we'll be same old, same old all season, and if we don't sort it out (and on a more permanent basis) by season ticket time then I fancy sales will take a huge dive as IMHO that is where the problems start. Not finish, by any means, but that's my personal starting point.

But TBF you're just dying for McNamara to get the chop, and have a child-like belief that this one thing will instantly remove all mistakes, dropped balls, needless penalties, will transform the kicking game, will turn the defence into an impenetrable steel wall and will turn our attack into a cross between Buzz Lightyear and the Harlem Globetrotters.



You're a single issue voter.

I couldn't agree more, I mentioned on another thread, if this is not addressed first and quickly then the rest of the recruitment/resigning/junior development wont matter at all.

Except I have never said that, ever. Stop making things up again!







That is because I am right.

That's right, so the next step has to be getting the existing crop of players (including a few who have a bit of talent) to improve.



I draw your attention to Tony Smith at Warrington. Not only has form turned around, but the signs are there that he is beginning to overcome Warrington's biggest weakness over the last 2-3 seasons - their goal-line defence. If the right man is available Bradford need to be making a similar appointment IMO, maybe demoting McNamara to no.2 or 'promoting' him upstairs a la Powell at Leeds.



It seems to me that since McNamara took over at Bradford results and performances have consistently been in decline. Then there are the embarrassing results - losing to Wigan in the play-offs after leading by 30 points, the Catalans CC game, the Cas game this season, and now the first team to lose to Celtic. It seems to me that there is a major attitude problem at the club preventing the team playing (never mind playing well) for 80 minutes and it will need a change in coaching staff to remedy this.



McNamara seems to have admitted that he doesn't know what the problem is, therefore it is unlikely that he knows how to fix it.



Interesting that the player getting the most stick is a survivor from the glory days (Deacon) - not one that your current coach brought in.

That's the point I've been making now for the last season and a half.

Seems to me that we went wrong at the time we bought Jeffries (and I said so at the time) unless the plan had been to play Jeffries at 7 and promote/buy a 6. Of course we now know the plan was never to drop Deacon so the question what we bought Jeffries for remains unanswered. By the way Jeffries was pish-poor yesterday but it is unlikely to be a co-incidence that this happened at the same time as he was back to stand-off next to one of the Deacon twins (non-identical), the one who can't play and can't kick.



As for Deacs, in recent times, IMHO, he's had too many hard knocks, and seems to get head injury after head injury, like a boxer who's had too many fights. I have always been a big Deacon fan, but he's become a miniature of the team as a whole - one good performance then very poor. Just now he's too often not only a pale shadow of what he once was, most of the time, he is prone to bouts of kicking like yesterday that are frankly disastrous, are a real liability for the team, and must knock the stuffing out of them.

Were Mogg and Bird the possible sixes? What about Rooney? What six should we have picked up? These aren't intended as rhetorical questions btw. I remember you said you wished we picked up Thorman but Hull fans seem pretty pd off with him of late.

At the end of the day I do think it is down to the coaching. You can have the most talented group of individuals in the world but, eventually, a lack of respect or self-belief will come through. There are many analogies in football.

I would look at HKR, Cas & Catalans as role models. All are similar in stature & ability to Bradford, maybe less, but they have gradually grown each season under quality coaching & steady recruitment (Cats are declining this year due to an inferior coach IMO).

Thorman and Jeffries seems like a potentially top-4 halfback pairing to me.



TBF though we couldn't have predicted the extent to which Deacon's almost total loss of form has become a positive problem, or I suppose the terrible run of knocks and injuries he's had, the latter must be a factor in the former.

They may have been, but they did not come on board so we will never know.



What is more pertinent is whether people feel that the coach is getting the best out of a group of players he declared himself happy with at the start of the season?