cherry.pie wrote:
My main point is that Murphy at fullback in my opinion wasn't a huge problem. The problem was the inability of the defence to put any sort of pressure on Sinfield when it was blindingly obvious that he would try spiral bombs regardless of who was at fullback.
I think you are wrong here in that as I said who was at full back will have dictated Sinfields tactics. I don't think you can take it as read he would have played the game the same way with Pat there. The irony is given Sam is not the best under a high ball either the one positive about him being out would have been Richards ability in this area.
Half decent pressuring of the kicker would have prevented the kicks from going up and Murphy would have been comfortable. Let a top quality kicker have all the time he wants and he's going to trouble any fullback in the world.
As a generalisation that is true but we aren't generalising. We are comparing Murphy to Richards in this game and speculating if Richards would have dealt with these kicks better. I think he would have and I also think he would have less to deal with.
It's a remarkably simple tactic and one that Warrington used to good effect in the challenge cup semi final and there's absolutely no excuse for Wigan to have allowed Sinfield to put in so many excellent kicks throughout the game when he's the only player in the side to actually have a dangerous kicking game.
That doesn't matter if they are dealt with.
The ifs and buts and maybe's around Murphy's selection are largely irrelevant, the team failed in a basic area of the game before Murphy had to deal with any kicks and had they done what you would expect of any team there wouldn't be an issue.
No. His selection is only irrelevant if you think it would have made no difference if a different player had been picked at full back instead. That is not the case in my opinion. We would have been better with Pat at full back than Murphy.
The one reason why that might lead back to the selection issue is that we've been awful at pressuring the kicker throughout the season; possibly the worst in the league for that and perhaps there was enough warning for Shaun Wane to think that no matter what happened the team just wasn't going to be able to do that and it would leave the fullback exposed.
In which case picking a rookie at FB was nuts. But he clearly didn't recognise that problem anyway.
I think Wane has some explaining to do over picking Murphy at full back regardless of how we pressure the kicker or if Pat would have been better.
Picking a player who has played one SL game for a play off semi final in any position is highly questionable. It really is the wrong sort of game to be doing this when he could have had more experienced players out there.