Couldn't put it better myself! If fans think things will change over night now Tony Smith is in charge then they're wrong. It is clear there has/are problems deep down at our club and but I believe TS has already shown that he isn't going to take anyone under performing and slowly we will see the results. Fans need to give the players time and get behind the team... and booing is NOT going to help matters, only destroy the confidence that TS is trying to give the players!

I think it puts into perspective what Cullen was actually achieving. The players ultimately let him down.

Yep I agree . Cullen did well ..

I think TS think our underachivement is down to our inconsistency and our inconsistency is down to our defence. It looks like the big time beer monsters are on there way out. We will get there.

Its gonna be a long season though

Was going to make a similar point. Under Cullen we were never this bad.

I am shocked by how far backwards we have gone.

Part of me feels anger towards Lowes, as it was under him that the team went so far backwards, but it couldn't possibly go that wrong due to the manager in such a short space of time, could it?

I'd feel much happier if he was on his way too now to be honest. A legacy from the past we are trying to recover from.

Do you really think one pre-season with the wrong man in charge can have such a negative effect on a team? I keep wondering whether my anger is misplaced?

I think your pre-season dictates how your whole season goes.

Yeah, that's my thought too, watching them yesterday it was just shocking how that team looked a shadow of it's previous attack minded self.

No. The only coach we need to look at when trying to pinpoint fault was the one who was in position for 6 years, not one who had just 14 games. People have short memories.

Agreed. Lowes has to be held accountable.

But this team is playing nothing like any of Cullen's teams, this is why I'm not convinced by that.

We have had many debates about Cullen, and there was clearly too much of an emphasis on attack for us to win anything, but this team looks nothing like anything Cullen did with them.

Also agreed. What Lowes has done in pre-season has been totally inadequate on several levels.

At least the players (on the whole) looked as though they wanted to actually play under Cullen. And play with some degree of style.

I cannot disagree that the playing style has changed. But PC presided over a significant period of time in which he was content to re-sign under performing players, make hit and miss overseas signings which continue to dog subsequent managers, having a self confessed relaxed attitude to off field discipline and allowing malcontent to fester in the dressing room. PC needed to go, lets not forget that.

Please explain where you think Cullen did well ????????????
Cullen under achieved,he was found wanting in all aspects of his coaching and when appointed had little more experience than Lowes did ,to sum it up Cullen was the wrong appointment when he was 1st given the job ,yes he did keep us up but any new coach uplifts a team for a few games it is what he achieved since then and with the amount of money that has been thrown at it he FAILED in every area of his reign .

Yep, but that was last season's debate, and he went.

If this team was still playing like they were under Cullen, then IMO you could still hold him accountable here, and claim it is his legacy, however all the good things fom Cullen's reign seem to have been stripped out, and not replaced by anything good.

He looks like an overachiever compared to what is happening now.

The pre-season dictates your whole season, remember Lowes will have had a completely different set of principles in terms of attack and defensive structures, team discipline that he needed to get across in the pre-season and either they have come across badly to the players and they haven't fully undertood them, they simply didn't work or the players didn't buy into what he was trying to do.

It isn't just about telling a team what you want them to do, they have to understand it and also the reasons behind it before they will really want to take it on and make it their own.

I also don't think our pre-season has prepared the team phisically for the season correctly. We looked exausted in that heat yesterday, Cas had also had a game 3 days before hand and didn't look half as tired as the Warrington players.

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.