Right, this is going to be brief.
That was dreadful wasn’t it?
You knew it was going to be shit when Huddersfield managed to fuck up the instruction of stand in front of the big flag instruction by immediately standing behind it.
There’s an old Morecombe and Wise sketch, you know the one, Eric tells Andre Previn that he’s “playing all the right notes – but not necessarily in the right order”. That’s Gareth O’Brien, that is. He’s got most of the ingredients to be a good half back he just doesn’t have a clue when to use them. Meanwhile, Danny Brough took us to pieces showed us what a decent half back can do for an ordinary team.
Shuddersfield (can we still allowed to call them that?) weren’t great, but they didn’t need to be. Brough’s drop goal at the end of a half that left me wondering what the frig I was going to write about showed that Fartown had every confidence that that was going to be enough.
We were rudderless. The forwards did their best to lay a platform, but when you’re having to repeatedly having to come out of your own 20 with no kicking game to make yards, there isn’t a lot of point to smashing up the middle. If the halves aren’t creating anything either, then you’re relying on mistakes from the opposition and Huddersfield didn’t make mistakes.
Jamie Ellis gave the visitors the lead after just six minutes, the Owen Craigie impersonator grubbered for himself and grounded with Brough adding the conversion.
Sustained Warrington pressure kept Huddersfield in their own half for large periods, but a lack of any real attacking threat lead to off loads in order to find a gap. When it goes well it’s great to watch. When it finds the ground, it’s poor and the errors kept coming.
Aaron Murphy pushed it out to 13-0 early in the second half and the game was up. Warrington scored back to back tries, firstly through O’Brien who hit a gap from a Chris Bridge off load and then Kevin Penny crossed in the corner that gave a gloss to the score that Wire barely deserved. Murphy’s second a couple of minutes later finally pulled the Giant Eagles away. A shocker of a pass from Man of Steel™ Daryl Clark gave Jermain McGilvary a walk in. Eorl (Shirley it’s not funny anymore to insert something about Big Daddy here) Crabtree then crashed over late on. It was, as his uncle used to chant in the ring, EAZ-EH. EAZ-EH.
Widnes next week, and if history is to teach us anything, it’s that no matter how utterly wank they look prior to derby day, they always seem to turn it on for their cup final. Hopefully we can find that level of motivation for this fixture this year, because it’s a hard one to look forward to in this type of form.
Pies And Piss 