Chris22

Pele and Ese'Ese have got a size advantage on the likes of Lees, Delaney and Mata'utai and they really do not run their weight. The young Hull players gave their best effort but I didn't think their more experienced players led in the way that you would expect them to. Really tough times for Hull at the minute.

Bookies giving us a 30+ start. Very generous given that we've only won by that margin twice since September 2022. Think we'll win but won't be a blowout.

Since the start of March, we have scored 12, 20, 18, 20, 12, 8 and 8 points in our matches. We have won 4 of those 6 matches, ironically, one of those defeats coming in one of the two matches where we did crack 20 points! Our defence is usually excellent so despite being low scorers, we win more than we lose. But based on the season so far, if a side can score three tries against Saints, they will probably win. On a day like today where our defence was not good, we were comfortably defeated. I don't say this to take away from Warrington's win (I thought they were very good, especially Williams) but I doubt their players came out of the match thinking that was a particularly tough game. You can't win them all, but when you do lose, you at least want to feel that your opponent was pushed to its absolute limits to win. That didn't happen today, which is a concern.

Over 11,000 at St Helens today, at the start of the match anyway! Helped with a 2,500 + away following, but Saints' biggest Challenge Cup attendance since 2005.

There are no 'rugby league' towns in England, in my view. In every one listed in this thread, I would wager that more people follow football than rugby league.

I could spend all day thinking about this. But my instinctive answer was the GB v Australia test match at the JJB in 2003. It's remembered for the Adrian Morley red card but was a brilliant game aside from that.

On the subject of TV viewing figures, I think you get more 'IMG points' for getting over 150K average viewers for your TV fixtures. With all matches on TV and several at the same time, I would guess viewers are spread more widely this year.

I'm interested to see what side we name. Sironen and Percival are out. Walmsley, Lees and Batchelor all doubts. I would rather we didn't risk any players even with a slight knock given the far more important match we have next week. Goalkicking will be an issue for us. Percival isn't a natural as it is. So it's Makinson who is hit and miss or Dodd who hasn't kicked for a long time. That will make things harder for us as we will probably go up in 4 rather than 6. I'll back us to win, very narrowly!

I've learned my lesson about underestimating Salford! Saying that, I still think Wigan will win in a low-scoring, very-tight game! Winner will end the night top of the league tonight, which is credit to Salford's excellent start!

How can we say with such certainty how many teams will be in the Championship and League 1, when we don't know how many teams will be in Super League?

Thought this was a good piece in St Helens Star about the usual calls for Cup restructuring. Link

Thought we were in control until Percival's red card. I don't see that as an excuse though, I would expect us to be good enough to win even with 12 men when we had a 14 point lead. We made some mistakes and Salford were good enough to execute and finish those chances. Sneyd was excellent and I thought Salford's expansive tactics worked very well against us and I expect Leeds will use a similar approach next week. From our perspective, Dodd has had a really strong start to the season which has been great to see.

A home match against Salford is one we should be winning. I've been impressed by Salford so far. It won't be anything like the pre season friendly, but I think we'll win by about 16 points.

Two teams with identical records makes it hard to call. I don't know what to make of Warrington yet, they have won the games you would expect. They did ok against Catalans but will have seen it as a missed opportunity playing against 12 men for 40 minutes. I liked what I saw of Hull KR in weeks 1 and 2 but they were quite error-ridden last week. I'd back Hull KR but with limited confidence!

Where it is easy to criticise, we should praise where players they do the opposite. Take Ricky Leutele for example. Hurrell and Leutele clashed heads on Friday (Hurrell being the defender). I don't think there was any malice at all on Hurrell's part but he didn't bend his back either. It happened very quickly and was hard to spot until a replay. If Leutele stayed down, it would have been reviewed and Hurrell may have been sin binned or sent off. He got up and the game continued. Although the job of players is to win. When a rule gets puts in place, they will try and get around it. Always have, always will.