Smith is the antihesis of Cullen. It is clear to see that Smith is rebuilding our defence, an area of our game frequently criticised and rightly so.

It takes me back to the booing at HT yesterday. The scrambling and line defence, tracking back is something I haven't seen the the Johnson era. Clueless, all of them, except me and Keith.

Maybe it'd have been different if Smith had taken straight over from Cullen. We had a side playing 'showbiz' rugby, regularly scoring 30+ points per game & losing, like the Castleford game that brought Culls demise. Smith may have been able to come in, just keep the attcking structures that were in place, work on the defence, and gone with an outlook of 'If I can stop them conceding 1/2 tries a game, we'll win alot of these games'. It'd have been more of a tweaks than changes approach.

Fast forward to now, he's took over a side that couldn't defend for toffee, has struggled to score points all year, and is absolutely void of confidence, dating back to somewhere around last August, I think we have the second/third worst attack something like that, and he really has no foundations to base anything on, so he's gone literally back to square one. He's implemeting his defensive ideas, and they are obviously getting across. Maybe he thinks he can only fix one thing at a time, he'll look at his time here and see the defense improving, Matt King as an individual improving, Harrison arguably, and take positives, and see that there has been a response of sort, you've just got to believe in what your doing, and I believe in him, 100%

The end of the year, we'll see a large number of the players getting the chop, and thankfully a majority of the backroom staff, fitness guy etc are on one year deals, so we can go with a completely new broom if that's what Smith wants to do, and he can inject his ideas further on the team.

The pre-season MUST have a big influence on the season - if it didn't, clubs wouldn't bother with them. We started preparing for this season way back in October - Lowes pulled out of assisting with England to focus on club duties. It's clear the preperations have been substandard.

Yes!

Oh I agree, I'm just simply shocked that any skill with the ball that they seemed have under Cullen seems to have been erased from their skillset!

Can a bad pre-season have such a negative impact, or do we think it is a combination of focus, attitude, tactics, confidence etc? Some of the passing yesterday was really poor, when moving the ball wide has always been a real strength of ours, with most of those players being involved previously.

Confidence has to play part of it. See Mattk King for reference.

We've all got to take a big dose of hindsight, board, coaches and players, over what has happened in the last few years. The boards strategy was well intentioned.

If you trace back to June 2004 when Simon Moran became the majority shareholder, this combined with the new stadium gave us some potential and finance to go places. The squad we had at the time was playoff material but no more so the strategy was to bring in quality to improve us.

Most of the signings which were made since then were well received by the fans and had us excited, its only been in hindsight when players didn't perform that we have been able to be critical:

2004:
Henry Fa'afili, Martin Gleeson

2005:
Logan Swann, Toa Kohe-Love, Simon Grix, Andy Bracek
Chris Bridge arrived early season and Andrew Johns for the playoffs

2006:
Paul Rauhihi, Stuart Reardon, Rob Parker, Michael Sullivan, Richie Barnett

2007:
Adrian Morley, Paul Johnson, Vinnie Anderson

2008:
Michael Monaghan, Matt King, Chris Hicks, Louis Anderson

2009:
Gareth Carvell, Mick Higham


Thats 6 Great Britain internationals, 2 Australia internationals, 5 NZ internationals. 5 of the guys coming from the NRL were regarded as top NRL players and had played in Grand Finals.

Pretty much all of these signings excited us when they were announced so its a bit rich to turn around later and hammer the board for making the signings.

With the benefit of hindsight the ones of those I would have signed would be Fa'afili, Gleeson, Grix, Rauhihi, Morley, Hicks, Carvell, Higham. The common denominator of the others is they were not the player with us that they were at their previous clubs either because their bodies were shot by injury, or they'd achieved everything they were going to in their careers already and were in comfort zone mentality, or maybe they just were made to look better by the players they had around them.

Thats the lesson we need to learn for future signings, we've been burned in the past and I agree with the names that have been mentioned on this forum recently like Shenton, Myler etc for players to look for - either upcoming young players with talent or players with something still to achieve, for this reason I'd be interested in Brett Finch who I understand is going to stay in the NRL the rest of this season and look to England in 2010.