As tedious as this thread is, it's probably the right place to make observations about this Saints squad (who clearly can be stopped) so I'll throw my two penneth in.
One of the things that is helping make them so successful is that they've found a couple of ways to break the rules that are seemingly never going to get penalised any more and it's giving them tiny advantages at least once or twice every set. When they're attacking and their player is tackled they either move forward in the process of getting up, or after playing the ball move forward and engage the first marker - Walmsley in particular does this on practically every carry. When defending they have the standard late man in to slow down the ruck, but there's also a real tendency to get off their man at the back of the ruck and make no attempt to move so that the attacking hooker/acting 9 can access the ball - this happened probably half a dozen times last night, too many times to be chance, they're clearly coached to get up and stand in the way. Combine these factors with their apparent willingness to give away six agains and you've got them being allowed a huge amount of control over the speed of the game that they shouldn't have.
And before the over sensitive Saints fans come charging on, yes, I know all sides have moments when these things happen, it just doesn't seem coached into them, it doesn't seem part of their game plan. Much like when we were all criticising Wigan for trapping arms and cannonballing, just because they happened at other teams didn't mean they weren't a bigger culprit.
Also, I'm not blaming Saints, I'm blaming the authorities, because every single one of those things should be penalised and they've gone too far on the leniency in search of a faster game. If you penalised those things they'd largely stop and you'd still have a faster game.
So yeah, that's that.
