Not a great performance today, the defensive frailties that we've struggled with for most of the year were back. Chase had too much pace and run Addy and few others ragged at times. I suspected we might see a drop in intensity though after the play offs were out of reach for anyone living on planet earth. Probably not intentional but I guess after a long season we have some tired bodies in that squad.



It was an entertaining game if not high quality and the chat with Cas fans during the game added to what is usually a decent afternoon out at Wheldon road. Castleford deserved their victory today though.

4 words ......Best in the world .

we have been making schoolboy mistakes for the past 2 seasons and our defence has been shocking for the past 4 years. my humble opinion is LSH is not the man for the job and we need a better assistant coach.

Been waiting for this one. Lets blame the assistant priceless.

Don't think LSH is to blame when we have struggled in both attack and defence at times and often lacking confidence and the ability to kill a game off. At the end of the day FC is paid to sort these problems out, he hasn't been able to yet but hopefully with more time for recruitment and a decent per season he might improve.

Keith Booaza on Radio Leeds was classic.

I agree. Today was the worst defensive display, (against, with respect) a poor team. It's all about mindset. Today we just tried to come out and blow Cas away in attack. First ten mins it worked well, then we folded to cheap scores straight through the middle of defence.



Few games back, Hull had 5 sets on our line and didn't get through, because we knew we had to defend with our lives. We are capable of very good defence when we set ourselves up for a dogfight.

I think our biggest problem is a lack of grunt. There have been games, like Hull and the win at the Giants, when we've defended heroically, overcome a bigger team But in most games we've lost the physical battle. A lot of the silly errors follow on from that.

I'm a bit surprised by some of the negativity in this thread.



Castleford have scored over 30 points in their last four games - including 30 against Warrington and 32 against Huddersfield, so it was obvious that they were likely to post a lot of points against us. And I think their recent form shows that they are clearly not 'a poor team', especially at home.



The key question was always going to be whether we could do enough to restrict their scoring, whilst scoring loads of points ourselves. And actually, we almost managed that didn't we? But for a last ditch wonder tackle on Kearney we could have been looking at an improbable 40-40 draw. Chase was the difference for me - we looked petrified every time he got the ball, and he mesmerised our lot numerous times (especially Addy, who must be having nightmares about Chase) - take Chase out of that game yesterday and we win.



Overall, I thought there was plenty of effort and commitment, but we lack 'grunt' in the pack (Scruton aside) as has been mentioned. And we seem to lack steadiness to know quite what to do at certain key points - so opposition teams seem to punish every mistake we make, whilst we inevitably seem to come up short far too often.

Very well reasoned post.



The draw would probably have not really been deserved, but you couldn't fault the lack of effort in trying to peg back a 16 point deficit in the last 10 minutes or so. Castlefords last try only came from Foster trying to keep the ball alive to Kearney. Also FWIW during this period I thought Donno stood out on attack, much more so than in previous games.

Thought Cas deserved the win overall, they had the edge in creativity, but both defences were pretty awful, almost non existent, at times. I thought generally we stuck to the task pretty well but made far too many errors with the ball to ever get a grip on the game so never really built any pressure. That said, neither did Cas in truth, with nearly all tries coming from an occasional spark of brilliance which the other side never seemed to have any idea how to counter.

Crikey.



I had a nosey at the match stats page on [url=http://www.superleague.co.uk/match_report/8934superleague.co.uk[/url and Cas "only" had 26.