Don't believe everything you read, it was the Warriors site making excuses for the loss. The only injured players I know of are the Lousi brothers. How can you have an injury ravaged team when you have 47 players in the squad at your disposal?
It looked men against boys until the second half when the Vulcans fielded a completely local team bar Foran with my boy at 17 and 2 19 year olds, a string of 20-21 year olds and they still outscored the 20s 3 tries to 1. In fact one of the 19 yr olds was having his first game of league, having just joined the team during the week after being sent over to the Vulcans by the assistant coach of the Warriors 20s and he scored a try on debut.
That 20s team was almost exactly the same as the one that gave the Waikato and Hawkes bay teams a hiding, who were also men, in fact this team was stronger. They ran more subs than the Vulcans too, it looked like they had about 5 more. They were missing
Ah Mau, Packer and
Taylor but the tries they conceded were mostly scored out wide. You can't really count Ben M but granted he could've kept the score closer. The 22 points were basically from Locke and Peter Mills, both fullbacks who were the standouts in my mind. Locke was getting hit hard though, I saw him get nailed 3 times and it was a wise move to sub him.
Poor Peter Mills lasted about 10 mins, engineered a nice try for Likiliki then was injured badly.
The Vulcans were missing more first line quality in:
Wayne McDade - Samoan RLWC prop
Kimi Uasi - Tongan RLWC backup hooker to Latu
Pale Ale - Monster 2 rower who played NZA 2 years ago
Nuivao Taka - Tonga U20s rep and Sharman player of the year in 08 and in my opinion is one of the top 4 Kiwi centres in the country and thats including Ropati.
The quality is there for the 20s but the leadership wasn't now that they don't have O'Regan who steered the ship last year IMO. I mentioned to Jesbass after the game that I think the 20s fortunes will rely heavily on how many games Packer plays for them. Captaincy would be a burden to Lockes game I feel, leave him to do what he does best. It sounds like Luke Laban is a fairly acomplished leader, maybe he'll step up in the coming weeks. They'll need to be good against the Titans who have a massive forward pack.