Re: Ian Lenagan
Posted: Tue Sep 27, 2022 10:57 am
Cracking post, totally agree with what you have said luckylucky 13 wrote: ↑Tue Sep 27, 2022 7:57 am I think you can pretty much say all the above is true to some degree.
Lam loves Wigan 100% he was a stop gap so always had that hanging over him.
While I genuinely like him his squad choices and subs at times drove me mad. He was unlucky not to win the GF the season when Matty Peet came back, that season when he arrived into our set up performances improved massively especially in D where Peet was supposed to be in charge. Singleton coming in also seemed to galvanize the squad towards the backend. The season after we lost Lockers from playing and while not at his best it's massive boots to fill from a standards point and that impact shouldn't be understated. We had also lost such a big turning point game on the last touch of the ball. Then Field got injured and we never recovered after Bevan also did his hamstring. The little things standard wise slipped and we never kicked on.
Things wasn't working and listening to the Matty podcast pre season it was pretty clear that he couldn't change what he wanted to from within in his position.
I think Briers brought a fresh out look like the recruitment it seemed people with points to prove and the right attitude off the field was to a degree the important attribute. You imagine all the best points are picked up by players from coaches they have played under but not all go on to be great coaches so questions rightly remain.
I will miss Briers, the reasons I didn't like him when a player was because he was so good and while he was with us you could see why he caused us so many problems. We all enjoyed our rugby this season I hope it's the same next season and better. We was always short in the centre, it's pretty obvious a Smith Tommy Powell combo in the halves in tough games didn't work and with no real cut outside in the centre it was like we had gone back a season, Faz was a huge miss he made up for that minus outside giving us some threat. Throw one of Cust or O'niel in and we are Ok. Powell is fine with Field Bev Cust Smith Faz outside the ruck but I wish we had a running threat form ruck. The semi we had lost Cust Faz and Bev and even O'neil who is a more threatening ball in hand. It allowed Leeds passive D to stand back and we lacked a way to break it even though I thought we was more dominant than Saints was in the final against them. Just as a note Briers was still coaching us in that semi?
I was proud of us last season not the finished article but plenty strides in the right direction.