I don't accept the injuries excuse because most of the replacements played much better than the guys before they got injured. Galloway the one exception.
Tedesco, Nofo and Simona were three of our best players, and they only got a run because of the injuries to ayshford, Lawrence and Moltzen who were absolutely rubbish.
Well, we lost Farah and Galloway, Fulton was out for several games and koro played very few games.
And the biggest problem with injuries is not necessarily the quality of players we lost, which was mostly poor, but the impact it has on consistency. If you look at the best clubs in the NRL, Storm, Souths and Roosters you'll also find that they played the least amount of players in the season. A stat in around Round 8-10 gave the 2 teams with least changes to their roster and that was the same as 1st and 2nd on the table at the time and the team with the most changes was us, coming last at the time.
No coincidence that once we got some stability and the youngsters were allowed to find their feet we started doing better, like the Dragons game and even Souths was alright, refs didn't even give us a fighting chance after 20min.
If you remember, Tedesco was very average for his first 5-10 games in attack, alright in defence. Simona also was VERY average until that Panthers game and he'd already played 4-5 games in the season from memory. Siro, another guy who needed time to find his feet as well as his position. He was basically playing 2nd row with a 7 on his back. I could keep going but i'm tired and im sure you get that consistency in a team is key and it destroyed our season and we played some 35 odd players in 1st grade…
But what I am trying to tell you is that prior to the injuries we were still absolutely hopeless. If there had of been no injuries we would have remained hopeless (albeit consistently hopeless). Even though the young guys struggled they were still playing better than the people they replaced.
BTW, If you are using Fulton being out for a couple of games as a reason for our bad year you are severely clutching at straws. Fulton tries his heart out every game but he's a fringe first grader (at best).