Peter Gentle claimed that there were plenty of positives to come out of yesterday's performance. What do you think they are?



Mckinnon

O'Carroll

No injuries

All of those, plus Martin looked decent when he came on. Seymour appears to have the skills but didn't get much chance to use them

i think o carroll could be our best signing.. him and moa starting upfront would be good for us.. 2 battering rams

Difficult to say because we didn't get much ball. I think we only had three sets in their red zone and scored from two, the other Seymour was held up on the line so thats a 66% success rate

Positives - Richard Horne is one year closer to retirement

Another one is we won't get that ref again this season

1, We scored from a kick inside the 10

2, it was a friendly



The rest i cannot really comment on as i didn't go.



We may get the ref again as he is on the list of SL refs and reffed a couple of SL games last season.

God help us all!

I would add Seymour to that, showed in patches his skills and also his defence. Green did okay and Ogre off the bench is a right handful.

Positives:



I was able to pick out the players for the most part despite a bit of a kit clash!

Shouldnt get that referee many more times

O'Carroll

McKinnon - although would have expected more pace when he broke down the West stand side

Seymours defence - hits hard, which i havent had from a scrum half for a while





Other than that, not much

Performance wise



Mckinnon - Solid debut, confident

O'Carroll - Took ball up well and impressed me.

Sharp - Busy and looked confident no real errors.

Green - Held his own after his first touch knock on.

Seymour - Looked organised and decent kicking game, looking forward to him improving.



Team wise



We didn't really attack down the left side and i got the impression we didn't for a reason, we know what to expect from our left hand side but our right side has for years been our weak link and i thought we looked to utilise and develop that side in attack when we could at times which has got to be beneficial.



You could see some structure in attack when we did have the ball, with men in motion which makes a change but we didn't really help our selves with the amount of dropped ball and penalities we gave away. so we was always on the back foot and our fitness was always going to kick in when your doing a lot of defending.



We made some clean breaks from our own half and actually looked threating near the opponents line.



Overall - No injuries i don't think and I wouldn't of thought that Gentle is going to show all his cards in regards attacking moves etc in the first game, his main aim of just getting the lads use to the new structures that are in place and improving fitness levels. i think he will of learnt more from the game and the result then if we had put 50 past them and had it easy.



Anyone that thinks we should be hitting the ground running wants to get the head out the sand and bear in mind that we have a new coach and structures in place that are going to take time for the players to settle into.

I'm willing to give them the time and i think the 1st half of the season maybe a bit bumpy whilst we settle into the new structures but after the past 4 years and more i'm alright with that.

Agreed, nicely timed pass to put Martin in too. Front row was fine, back row need to raise their game.



Aspinwall seemed to go off injured but I guess its nothing serious as it wasn't mentioned, I had not even noticed he was on up till that point.