-Letting Inu go to another club. Should have let the tosser rot in reserve grade, rather than allowing another team to benefit from his poor attitude at the Warriors.
-High expectations brought about by our "lucky" finals run last season, and ill-advised over-confident comments from Bluey in the pre-season.
-Lack of experience throughout the ENTIRE team. I'd love to see a rundown on average age of our roster (sans injured players) compared to others. This inexperience is what has cost us in the close games - and there have been many of those.
-Time taken for the team to adapt to Bluey, and Bluey to adapt to the NRL. In my opinion he has the game plans to beat the best teams in the NRL but our defensive structure lets us down, along with bad luck and individual failings from our players.
-Weak roster. This seems like a ridiculous thing to say, but looking at 2012 squad compared to 2011... we are seriously lacking depth (read: experience) all over the park. The only area we haven't struggled to cover is the halves, and that's purely down to Johnson and Maloney being tough merkins. When I look at our squad compared to other teams and play the "which player would I want" game, half the players I choose from our team are chosen on potential, not on current value.
-Rookie squad. This team will be destroying the NRL in a couple of seasons. In the meantime it's going to be tough. Even our more experienced players like Mannering, Package, Matulino, Vatuvei are all in their early-mid 20s.
-Injuries!!!!!!!! Having had Sam Rapira, Nathan Friend, Micheal Luck, Manu Vatuvei, Jacob Lillyman, Jerome Ropati, Glen Fisiiahi, Alehana Mara, Steve Rapira all out for extensive periods - including Ropati, Rapira, Luck effectively gone for the season - we were always going to struggle.
-Form. Maloney hasn't kicked on from last year. Johnson is still finding his place in the universe. Vatuvei, Rapira, Lillyman have struggled to regain form even when not injured. Hell even our rookies such as Omar have been playing coming back from major injuries, and it shows.
-Composure. I have no idea whether the cheap penalties, lazy dropped balls, poorly timed passes, bad split-second decisions are the fault of players, coaching, conditioning, inexperience, attitude, or what. But we SERIOUSLY lack composure and this shows in close games, and in games when we get ahead then slacken off, our lack of ability to adjust to a change in the other team's tactics... and so on.
...despite this, we are only a few close losses out of the top 4. Which f**king sucks! But we HAVE the ability in our team, we just aren't applying it this season.