well we got the win
but not in the way we wanted, from the reports i have had it sounded like gateshead have progressed since last season and could surprise a few teams this year.
BUT in saying that it also worries me that again we are leaking trys.
it seems that the trys was scored from close range.
now i know we had prescott and big gil in the team yeasterday but we still are missing IMO some bulk in the team
we played 3 speed players in the backs with reece/james/grant.
i agree we have lots of pace when we attack and can move the ball well, but in defence is this a loss to us.
our centres just seem to light.

what are your thoughts

We won the game, got the points and can treat the midweek NRC game as a training session ahead of the first home league game of the season.

Early days andy - early days.

Have a look at the video of the tries on the Thunder website. Its the same problems as the Toulouse game , the line speed within our own 10m has to be spot on and it wasn't. There were also gaps on the right hand side a few times, one very well exploited by Brown for the 2nd Gateshead try and the tackling in that area needed more support to bring down the bigger man. Is just little things like that which will make the difference, I think it will be a much tighter league this year anyway. I like the way we can attack at pace through the middle particuarly through James and Reece and outwide which we didn't see so much of last year.

Gateshead are definately an improved side just on that video alone, but considering they haven't won a competitive game for TWO YEARS

rog i know its early but as the league is going to be so tight with the first 4 going up
if we drop points against teams like gateshead then this could be very harmfull at the end of the season

keep the faith Andy, i think we are beginning to see the first team develop, a win against Workington is a must, we need to win every home game and sneak as many away wins as possible, a top 4 place is still realistic.

I was just wondering after the weekend. Was there any supporters there. I didn't see any apart from the directors, Mark Rowley etc. I know the Cru had a poor away support but we looked a lot worse yesterday.

I also came to the conclusion that almost all our lads cant tackle as their players just seemed to walk through us at will. We can score tries but we cant stop the opposition and the chances arethat we are going to lose a lot of games if things dont change. We are just not learning from the mistakes that are being made.