Don't underestimate the role of confidence and how it affects all sportsmen (and women) and feeds in to a teams performance:
The batsman who scores freely seems to get all the breaks, nicks fly over or through the slips, big shots go just over the boundary fielders' heads or just wide of them, when they get bowled it turns out to have been a no-ball. Their team mates feed off this and they seem unstoppable.
Then, all of a sudden something inexplicable happens and nicks get caught, they can't hit the ball off the square and everything starts going wrong. They tighten up and that makes it worse and they start to play against the percentages to try to break their bad luck and it gets even worse.
I think we've seen something similar. After the break Jimmy rarely missed a kick, Jacob was finding massive touch kicks, long passes were going to hand etc. Everything they tried worked. This not only gave them confidence but also made the opposition wary. You even get the better end of refs' 50/50 calls and rarely pick up injuries.
Then, inexplicably, Jimmy misses a simple kick, Jacob misses a touch and they return it with interest, a long pass doesn't go to hand and gets dropped, the ball gets spilled in tackles, a tackle is missed. All of a sudden you start doubting yourself and getting tense. To make it worse the ref seems to have it in for you and you get more of those "rugby accidents" that we saw at the start of yesterday's game. It seems like a downward spiral
How to break that is one of sports mysteries, we were in a similar position at the start of the year and Dai left. Whether its the fresh start or something else is difficult to even guess at as an outsider, but I'm not advocating sacking coaches every time you go on one of these slumps.
Maybe we're not going to be the runaway league leaders and the style of play we had at the end of last season will mean the opposition are in with a chance of scoring, but the attitude of we'll score more can overcome that, but we will lose games. Its not the losing, its the manner of the loss that's dispiriting and feeds the lack of confidence.
Hopefully Joe, Will, Jack and Dobbie back will be that change and a catalyst for a couple of wins to rebuild build that confidence, not just with the players but with the coaches as well because they must be doubting themselves and that will feed in to the squad.