Catalans Dragons ended 2024 outside of the playoffs after reaching the 2023 grand final.
Superleague stats from the official website.
We played 27 league games winning 15 and losing 12.
Tellingly we only scored 474 points and conceding 427 leaving a +47 points difference, the metric that ultimately saw us outside the playoff spots.
St Helens took the last spot with a +208 difference.
So even if we had sparked against London and Hull in our last two league matches, as opposed to struggling to put away the bottom two teams, we would still have been struggling to close that gap and sneak ahead.
The last 10 games of the season summed it all up with 5 wins and 5 losses. The August 12-10 defeat away to London being the game that we will look back on as the one that got away.
To be honest after that game morale was shot and we were fighting an uphill battle against form and momentum, both of which were going against us.
The attack was the key area highlighted as letting us down. The try shy Dragons probably made the season seem worse than it was. Fact is though we scored 64 tries less than Hull KR who topped the regular season charts and that is nowhere close to being good enough.
As a result we were close to 300 points (or 10 games of points if you average it to 30 per game) behind Warrington who were the best of the season.
That speaks volumes and its that Catalans way of playing from deep and running in tries that we need to get back in 2025.
With the core of the English players announcing mid-season that they were all off the shutters seemed to come down and we knocked off for the campaign.
The likes of McMeechen, Johnstone and Davies have done brilliant things for our club, but their latter appearances and availability wont be remembered too fondly. Getting the right contract length and signing and exit plan is key to the success of the next few seasons.
We will start to look ahead to 2025 shortly. But for now let's enjoy the domestic league and hope for some Dracs success.
Fingers crossed... 🤞
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