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Kittwazzer wrote:FFS its over. We lost. Move on!

Are you having a bad month KW

cpwigan wrote:

Kittwazzer wrote:FFS its over. We lost. Move on!

Are you having a bad month KW

I would have said the same thing but he beat me to it :eusa14:

I think it's quite obvious that the Leeds performance was very overrated. I did say myself that they defended badly. They were better, but not by much. Just by virtue of making very few handling errors or penalties really.

Even with one of our worst performances they still needed to get 3 dubious tries off the ref.

cpwigan wrote:

markill wrote:Stats like missed tackles don't tell you where on the field they were missed. If Leeds made only 80% of tackles in our half but 100% in their own 20 but we made 98% in their half but 90% in own half then it would put a different skew on things.

Interesting post, but stats can say what you want them to say. But i assume you know this anyway CP.

Hence the title Mark and you are right but it still stands Leeds played a conservative low risk game to see if Wigan would make errors which we did. The big question down the track is can you win big games playing total RL?

Looking at your stats about yards made by our forwards though, you could argue that this rather than expansive play was the problem. It doesn't show that total RL was the reason we lost. Our errors in the first weren't due to Wane's attacking style of play - Sam dropped a kick, Josh dropped on own 10, Lockers dropped on a hit up from the stand off.

Leeds played conservatively out of their own half and got to the kick with a kicker in space, and when we didn't make an error in our own half, they kept us to less yardage and meant our kicks were from closer to our goal line and often under more pressure. We scored long range tries that kept us in it after the mistakes in the first half - long range tries are more 'total RL' so I don't think this conclusively says Wane's way won't win us finals. If we didn't make errors in our half and moved our defensive line up stronger and faster then we would have won, regardless of how conservatively Leeds played.

Leeds just worked on yardage, yardage, yardage though Mark until they get a very favourable field position or failing that put in a decent kick. If you limit offloading / passing etc then you are going to make far fewer mistakes and enjoy better territory. Even moreso if the opposition make mistakes giving you even better field position. We rarely asked Leeds to take the ball off their own try line.

As somebody else said there is willingness / desire to move the ball wide in our own half and/or move it around more which reduces yardage / field position unless you create a very favourable outcome. Whatsmore it can be more exhausting. Even the oft used ploy of Sam fielding a downtown kick, looking around and passing the ball laterally for 20+ yards immediately concedes yards and field position.

IIRC it was OAM that stated we are playing too much 2nd man stuff. I tend to agree. We may also need to play a more hard yards / field position game in our own half.

TWO EYED WARRIOR wrote:My own theory is that we rely to much on sams backman plays we have killed teams with this many many times this year and more often than not he was stopped on Saturday.

Farell worked a similar play closer to the ruck and it was far more effective and we scored and we looked like we could kill Leeds with these options as there forwards would have easily tired defending.

We also, earlier in the season doubled up on the backman runners and gave face ball passes and sorched through the gaping holes as a result.

I would have thought that these would have been more effective tactics especially when most of own pack were not up to speed and could not keep up the off the ball running to the levels acheived so far this season.

Mistakes obviously didnt help but to be honest i would have like to see more options on the backman plays rather than just replying on sam.

Against Saints this season we have had two, sometimes three rows of dummy runners and most of those plays were initiated from Finchy and Tommy.
Against Leeds no Tommy so with Lockers being less effective, Leeds bottled Finchy up.

Panchitta Marra wrote:
Leeds bottled Finchy up.

I can't agree with that. Our first try was a flat pass from Finch to Carmont; second was Finch pass to Hock into a gap; third was a Finch pass to Farrel in a gap which led to Ben Flowers try; Josh's try came from some quick hands passing after Finch threw a long ball out right because Leeds hadn't numbered up on that side. Apart from Lockers try which was down to Sam's chip, Finch was effective. We did lack some offensive options, but we had a loose forward in the halfs which has already been discussed to death. The problem wasn't really scoring, because putting 28 points on another team should be enough to win. The real issue was the uncharacteristic defence

i'm spartacus wrote:

Panchitta Marra wrote:
Leeds bottled Finchy up.

I can't agree with that. Our first try was a flat pass from Finch to Carmont; second was Finch pass to Hock into a gap; third was a Finch pass to Farrel in a gap which led to Ben Flowers try; Josh's try came from some quick hands passing after Finch threw a long ball out right because Leeds hadn't numbered up on that side. Apart from Lockers try which was down to Sam's chip, Finch was effective. We did lack some offensive options, but we had a loose forward in the halfs which has already been discussed to death. The problem wasn't really scoring, because putting 28 points on another team should be enough to win. The real issue was the uncharacteristic defence

You're right about Finch's involvement in those tries - but on how many other occasions, particularly in the second half when we were chasing the game, did Finch get the ball on the back foot, or put Wigan on the back foot by throwing the long wide speculative passes that stop momentum like CP is discussing above. Leeds disciplined and fast defensive play certainly affected our rythym - that was already off with one ball player fewer in the team.

markill wrote:

i'm spartacus wrote:

Panchitta Marra wrote:
Leeds bottled Finchy up.

I can't agree with that. Our first try was a flat pass from Finch to Carmont; second was Finch pass to Hock into a gap; third was a Finch pass to Farrel in a gap which led to Ben Flowers try; Josh's try came from some quick hands passing after Finch threw a long ball out right because Leeds hadn't numbered up on that side. Apart from Lockers try which was down to Sam's chip, Finch was effective. We did lack some offensive options, but we had a loose forward in the halfs which has already been discussed to death. The problem wasn't really scoring, because putting 28 points on another team should be enough to win. The real issue was the uncharacteristic defence

You're right about Finch's involvement in those tries - but on how many other occasions, particularly in the second half when we were chasing the game, did Finch get the ball on the back foot, or put Wigan on the back foot by throwing the long wide speculative passes that stop momentum like CP is discussing above. Leeds disciplined and fast defensive play certainly affected our rythym - that was already off with one ball player fewer in the team.

I think what emerged was that the short pass was far more effective than the longer passes / 2nd man plays because Leeds were virtually umbrella like in their determination to prevent Sam breaking through.

We didn't just lose an organiser down the middle - we had players playing with recent knocks (McIlorum, Lima) or players playing that haven't had much game time recently (Hansen, Flower), and having that without the normal leader to get them together in that middle channel meant we lost the battle on most occasions.

My point remains that we can't use the statistics of this game to look ahead to what might happen in future semis/finals as we don't know what the situation with our line up in attack and defense will be. We still could have had Lockers down the middle in defence and one of the weaker or less fit defenders wider so maybe that lesson will be picked up on if any half back emergencies happen again. At least we can fit Matty Smith in at 7 and Lockers at 13 again now and work from there.