Eels Blogs

So I ventured out of the comfort of my cozy surrounds and attended a match for the first time at Centrebet Stadium. I was really impressed with our showing and I don't think that the 10-all scoreline did our efforts justice.

Hayne was impressive from fullback and was one of our best. He scored the opening try off a perfectly weighted chip from Chris Sandow that saw Hayne fly above the pack and take the ball. Sandow had a pretty good game with only 1 or 2 errors and his kicking game was a lot better than last season. The young 5/8 was very confident in himself and didn't have any problems directing his more experienced forwards around.

Keating had a good game and had some incisive runs whilst he was on the field. Our attack (For the first time in seasons) didn't seem disjointed and each player knew their role. Lussick and Mannah both showed early aggression with Mannah at one point throwing a punch at Tim Grant after the latter attempted a Liverpool kiss.

Matt Ryan seemed to be picked on by the referees and was sin-binned for a supposed grapple-tackle after a warning. If that is now the precedent then I expect the entire Melbourne squad to be sin binned every match. Ryan did however push forward in attack and was busy early on. A good sign for us, we didn't concede a point with only 12 men on the field.

Paulo and Ben Smith both had quiet games but they were neither brilliant nor terrible. Paulo did seem to be playing as the extra ball-player and was used as a link between the halves and Hayne. Fuifui did his usual grunt work up front. He was always willing to take the ball up. Allgood has put on some size and was quite involved in his defensive work. 

The rest of our bench was very impressive. Ken Edwards has a real future and he really scared the day-lights out of the Penrith pack. He combined surprisingly well with Ben Roberts who played at hooker. Roberts himself had a very good game, kicking 2 40/20's and being very energetic around the ruck. He had a couple of plays with Edwards, one which was executed to perfection. Roberts jumped out of dummy-half and grubbered it through for Edwards. The Penrith fullback picked it up but was man-handled into touch by Edwards.

We led 10-6 for most of the match. Our second try was scored by Cheyse Blair after a couple of selective passes from Paulo and Sandow. Penrith didn't level the scores until after we had basically our third-string team out there. (Our most experienced player at that point was Ken Sio). Our defence stood up under pressure and we showed good aggression when needed. There were surprisingly few errors given the weather conditions.

NB: I would give an evaluation of the rest of the players but I didn't know who half of them were. The majority of young forwards we have seem to be big, fast, strong and skillful. Hopefully we hold on to them.