Excellent thread this. Thanks to all contributors.

Let's hope Rohan's positive attitude - under all circumstances presented to him so far - rubs off on ALL the players!

You only need one player with a poor attitude for this to have a knock-on effect on others.

Indeed. And he seemed to me at least to be doing a better job of it. Perhaps as has been hinted at, there are/were a number of people contributing towards the poor attitude and all of them need to be sorted/replaced before it resolves the issue. Head coach has been replaced, but if the captain and assistant are part of the problem too, they maybe need taking out of the equation.

Which is exactly the reason I hope we actually keep him on. He's been a different player since Smith arrived and he's done exactly what I'd like him to do. I'm not asking him to be the greatest prop in the world. I want him to be a big, scary pacific islander who going to run hard and put the odd defender/runner on their back. That sort of thing lifts the crowd and your team mates. We've missed that. I think the last player we really had with that was Elima.

I also think we've looked more lost since Purtell has been injured. While I know he's not quite got the mongrel we need, it's hard not to want to follow a guy who has a heart attack and comes back to play on. A bit like Brent Tate with his neck. We always looked a little calmer and more structured with him on the field.

Bill Walsh, coach of the San Francisco 49-ers and a three-time Super Bowl winner, wrote in his book [iBuilding A Champion[/i:

When a wildebeest or zebra is finally entrapped by the lion, it submits to the inevitable. Its head drops, its eyes glaze over and it stands motionless and accepts its fate. The posture of defeat is also demonstrated by man - chin down, head dropped, shoulders slumped, arms hung limply. This posture is often visible as players leave the field in the later stages of the game when things are going against them. I often brought this to our players' attention using the example from nature and we became very sensitive to it. I would remind them never to allow this to occur. I would assert, "Even in the most impossible situations, stand tall, keep our heads up, shoulders back, keep moving, running, looking up, demonstrating our pride, dignity and defiance."

We're in a league where the play the ball is slower than SL, and our number 1 prop instead of fighting for every split second and get a quick ptb insists on holding players on to him trying to milk a penalty, at a time where this practice is so commonplace it's comical and even refs no longer buy it.

Sidlow; stop it.

Any team needs both the hod carriers and the scrappers. Blaming Sidlow for being a hod carrier when the blame should be on the management for not having the scrappers alongside him is to me unfair.