Match 17: London(Summer Bash)
fevnut's musings
52-10, big win, but a bit troubled too
As I walked away from the ground last Saturday
I wasn’t feeling as good as I thought I should have been after a comprehensive win
like that.
Thinking about last season, we did so well to
get into the Qualifiers, but then collapsed ignominiously in those matches. But
we did get the extra funding that is being sensibly used to strengthen Rovers
both on and off the field. We’ve seen how extra money like that can be wasted
with stupid decisions which end up putting clubs in peril, a prime example
being the Sheffield decision to go fulltime in 2016.
The goal for Rovers is Super League but we need
to build incrementally year on year so that when we do get promotion we are
strong enough to sustain it. Those 2016 Qualifiers showed that we were nowhere
near at the required level.
We were overwhelmed and in consequence lost the
team spirit that had built in the Championship run-in.
So the team needed to be strengthened and in my
mind there were 2 goals for the 2017 season.
The first was to get into the Championship Top
4 again and so into the Qualifiers. Tht appears to be harder than it sounds. In
the first year it was Leigh, Bradford, Sheffield and Halifax that made it and
only Leigh repeated it last year. They were joined by London, Batley and Fev.
This year Batley look to be out of it and there
is going to be an almighty battle between Fev, Toulouse, London and Halifax to
get into the Qualifiers. Last week all the top 5 won and the gap between 5th
and 6th is now 8 points. But if we hold our nerve we should stay in the top 4.
I thought that the second target for this year
should be for the team to learn how to be more consistent and to put in 80
minute performances. Only then, could we seriously hope to start challenging
the bottom 4 from Super League.
And that is what was troubling me last week.
Yes, it was a good win but there were periods of the game (in the second half) when
instead of seriously taking a weak team apart we started to lose our structure,
the ball-handling which had been so good in the first 40 fell apart and we
failed to push on. With the halftime score at 32-4 and Dewsbury demoralized we
should have got to at least 70 points by the end.
Of course, there have been some really good
performances, notably against Halifax in the Cup, but we need to be far more
consistent.
The next run of games will really test if we
have what I takes … London in the Summer Bash, Hull KR at home, Bradford away
and then Leeds in the Challenge Cup.
The measure of success won’t be winning them
all, it will be whether we can put together consistently good performances with
no repeats of last week’s second half!
************************************************
Toronto again
I like the idea of
Toronto playing in our League. But they should never have been allowed to put
together a team so strong that they end up beating a very good Barrow side, who
had previously won seven out of seven, by 70 points to 2.
Just as worrying was the
visa issue which meant that four Barrow players couldn’t go. What is going to
happen when clubs make signings in mid-season. It may well be that those new
players won’t be able to get to play in Toronto because they haven’t had time
to sort out visas. If the Canadian government want Toronto to have the chance
to play in a professional competition then they need to establish a much easier
system for the players of other clubs to be able to get into Canada. It should
be a requirement if Toronto are to be allowed to remain in the ‘English’
leagues.
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