Quote wire-quin="wire-quin"Nick the Greek dropped about 5 at Leigh and probably a similar number against Skolars. Powelly took him of at Leigh I noticed!'"
He was taken off and sent back on again so many times I lost count. Most of our interchanges seemed to feature him one way or the other. I think Rob Powell was doing it on purpose to wind up the PA announcer, who couldn't cope with "Kouparitsas" and gave us at least three different versions, all of them delivered with an uncertain stutter, before giving up altogether and only announcing the oncoming player when he came off for the final time.
On the face of it this was a pretty worrying display against a lower league side. My first thought was that we looked either seriously undercooked or seriously e! It was a game we could easily have lost after leading 24-6 during the first half; our lead was down to two points for much of the final quarter and overall we had the rub of the green from the officials in terms of questionable calls. If this had been a Challenge Cup match we'd have come away relieved just to be in the draw for the following round.
Apart from a couple of games with Skolars at the HAC this was the first Quins pre-season game I've seen, so I'm not sure how much to read into the performance. I've watched enough football pre-seasons to know that an apparently perfect build up can lead to a major flop in the first league game, and an apparently shambolic pre-season can be followed by everything miraculously clicking into place on the big day.
Perhaps a rather kind looking draw for the first two rounds of SL fixtures - two of the weaker looking sides, one on neutral soil and the other at home - has led to many of us placing too much emphasis on the importance of winning these particular games. It looks like we've been handed a golden opportunity to get four points from the first two fixtures. However, we have a new young coach and a lot of new players, many of them inexperienced and a few looking to prove a point after setbacks at previous clubs. It's going to take time for everyone to settle down and grow as a team, so logically we ought to be at our weakest and most vulnerable in the early games regardless of how well or otherwise pre-season has gone.
Trying to be realistic I'd like to think we can win more matches than last season and be more competitive and push our opponents closer in the games we don't win.
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