Also before Hull scored - Kendall made up a knock-on against Smith when the Hull player just dropped it and then Wardle was picked up off the ground and put into touch. Basically gave them the game.

I'm not sure it's as straightforward as that. I think it probably played a part but we've seen this team have days off in every season recently, even when we've gone on to win everything. They have a bit of that 'we only need to turn up' in them on occasion. What they have been good at is bouncing back from those days and they've also been good at making sure those days have come in games where it wasn't hugely important. Unfortunately this one did matter but I'm with Phuzzy above, I think this exit makes our chances of winning another Grand Final better and I do think the players will take some pretty important lessons from this defeat.  

I think they had the attitude of we just have to turn up about them yesterday, the looked as if they could just give up possession cheaply and not suffer from it as 'we are Wigan', if we had respected the ball more and got back to basics then we would have seen the game out.

I was going to mention Ellis too as it definitely compounded the problems at the back end of the game but I thought the roll was already on at that point. Had he stayed on the field we might have held on but the mistakes were made earlier. 

I think Leeming to 6, French to fullback and everyone else staying the same was the way to go. That would have massively helped our defensive structures and retained some sort of running threat from standoff. To put it in it's most simplistic terms, Leeming has more of the French attributes at standoff that Keighran on 2 legs, never mind the 1 legged version! It would also have allowed for Eckersley and AK to switch in defense if necessary. Given we had Forber on the bench it almost seems like a no brainer to me and I can't for the life of me work out what the thinking was behind all the positional swaps we made just to end up with a completely unbalanced right side. Strange. 


As you say, the coaching staff have plenty credit in the bank and there's no such thing as someone who gets everything right. Let's just hope the necessary lessons are learned going forward. 

It's all a matter of opinion, of course, but I don't think it has. We played well the week before Vegas, we played well at Vegas and we played well the week after returning. We were also playing particularly well in this game up until the Field injury (16-0 up and looking unstoppable at that point). The Field injury wasn't caused by Vegas (he'd trained for 2 weeks and played 1 1/2 games since returning) so I'm not exactly sure how you attribute Vegas as being the cause other than to fit a pre determined narrative. 

Any Vegas hangover should be out of the system by now, within two weeks the system should be back to normal and we should be over any jet lag etc. for me we just made too many changes and had too many changes on one edge, if Keighran had to stay on then defending in the half back spot was probably correct as there should be enough support around him to make up for any loss in pace, but then having Faz and Eckersleys lack of experience on the wing, really compounded everything.