There's a saying you often hear which I'll paraphrase here: No one can stop Wigan but Wigan themselves and that very much applies in this instance. Without taking anything away from Hull who were excellent in that second half and were good enough to exploit the weaknesses presented to them, I think we could play that game another hundred times and not lose it from the position we were in at half time. 

Everything that could be done wrong, we did wrong. The coaching staff, who have been exemplary for almost 2 years, got it wrong following the Field injury and everything snowballed from there. This is not hindsight. I said it at the game. I've posted elsewhere that we ended up with Eckersley, who's not really a winger, Farrell, who's not really a centre (let alone a right sided one!) and a one legged Keighran, who's not really a half all defending alongside each other and being covered by a fullback who hasn't played the position in around a year and, if rumours are to be believed, hadn't trained all week. All because one player went off! I'm not sure we could have got that any more wrong. 


You're probably right about the pitch as Barron for Hull also went off with a tight hamstring but regardless of that we should have comfortably seen that game out. 


On a positive note though, I'm actually less bothered about this loss than I thought I would be. I said before the season started that another clean sweep wasn't really on the cards. The last 6 trophies on the bounce is a great record but it was never going to be 9. This loss should work in our favour with regards to taking out the Grand Final again and, ultimately, that is the one I think we all want. I'm not saying we'll win it. As we've just seen, anything can happen on the day, but I do believe this ultimately puts us in a stronger position to make it 3 in a row. 

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.