I'll be honest, I'm really not sure what to make of this afternoon. I've deleted and retyped this about fifteen times as I've tried to make sense of my own opinion.
I've always felt that games should be taken singularly. Looking back on our recent Cup and Trophy disasters, and trying to place today alongside them, makes today's performance seem worse than it was. Try to take the past debacles out of the equation, and look at today solely on its own rather than as another sort of disgraceful Trophy loss at lower opposition.
It was a really, really poor offensive performance and it cost us in a game that was there for the taking. Having the ball means nothing if you don't actually create a sodding chance, but they played very deep and we seem to frequently struggle against that sort of approach.
That's why I can't compare this game to the Blyth game, where we fell apart against a side that we invited on to us. For the most part we controlled the game and I thought we were defensively sound for the vast majority. We weren't all over the place and getting out-battled in every 50/50, we weren't weathering wave after wave of Bath attacks. We just didn't have an offensive answer for a side that to their credit defended very well.
It wasn't good enough, and I'm not trying to justify what was a pretty sh*t performance, but I just don't personally think that was as much of a no-show from our team as some believe.