Drinking the pre season Kool-aid

We were drinking the Kool-Aid from day one of the pre-season. Big gulps. 
Every little thing in the off-season felt like proof we were onto something. The Lomax stance? Finally, we’ve got a backbone. The club stands for something. Love it. 
Pezet on a one-year? Sneaky smart. You start talking yourself into how that could actually be a Ryles masterstroke. 
De Belin, Kelly… yeah alright, maybe. 
Then all the Moses chat kicks in. This is the year. Breakout. Leader. The media and Journalists start backing us. Everything starts lining up nicely in your head. 
Then the season starts… and it hits you. 
We weren’t building anything. We were just talking ourselves into it. 
All that “identity” stuff? Turns out we suffer from multiple personality disorder, and none of them are good. 
Classic. Cheers for the Kool-aid it tasted better this year. 

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  • What's wrong with being optimistic? I'll be impressed when someone correctly predicts (so that's ahead of time) our success, not failure after it's occurred. So much commentary on here is past tense and completely focused on our flaws. 

    • Nothing wrong with optimism. Deep down it's all Eels fans have. As far as predicting our success, help me, you seem to have some good insight. I've been trying to predict it for over 25 years, some here, for over 40. 

      • i don't know man I used to get on here and whinge and bitch about everything and I came to the realisation that it's pointless and doesn't represent my passion for this club.

        So when things are going to shit (like they are now) I try and keep my trap shut and not sink the boot in all the time just for the sake of it.

        I generally view things through a long term lens and I think the long term plan we've got is sound. But we've got to be patient and not compare ourselves to what's happening at other clubs because our situation is unique to us. Good things will happen, we all deserve it.

        • I like your attitude. 
          At some point after a few decades I just want success. 

    • I Predict as soon as we can sign the players Ryles wants first up. We will be on our winning way. Until this problem is truely understood, enacted upon and fixed, we will always be at the start of a rebuild. We could fill a state of origin team with the players we have courted and not signed.

  • I know some of our injury issues were unavoidable,  but I think its no coincidence our head of physical development was brought over from the spoon winning Newcastle knights.   The number of soft tissue injuries are off the scale.   

    • It does look a bit funny when we get:

      • Our GM of Football from the basketcase of the time (Tigers when they were rabble)
      • Our Head of Physical Development from the basketcase of the time (Knights when they were rabble)
      • Our mid-season star signing from the basketcase of the time (St George are currently rabble)

      Who knew getting a collection of people from the worst performing clubs wouldn't translate into immediate success?

      I'm being a bit tongue in cheek, but it definitely doesn't seem like a winning strategy so far.

      • No Capt. Thats not tounge in cheek, thats our reality. How those calls are being made is amazing. I wonder who is in charge of the football dept. Perhaps he needs to pick his game up.

    • Soft tissue injuries? Mainly from trauma, like contact and excessive force. Why lob this squarely at the foot of the trainer and not playing a contact sport? 

      Also, when the previous head of atheltic performace (Blair Mills) left, you claimed Matthew Jay would be 100x better. This axe to grind against the entire club is getting old, don't you think?

      31134576688?profile=RESIZE_710x

  • The Lomax court battle was a genuine win and was something to be proud of. It absolutely did require the club to have a spine and to call the bluff of some pretty intense and powerful characters. So credit where it's due, it was a fun ride and we should be proud of how we handled it as a club.

    The roster? I didn't see many excited about Pezet, I think we were mostly bewildered at the stupidity of the deal. Kelly...no one is ever excited by him. JDB? Definitely underdelivered, but we know that forwards decline very quickly and the pace of the game is up this year, so that's potentially a bad buy in retrospect, but probably wasn't bad depth at the time of purchase.

    We are definitely underachieving, but not by an enormous amount. Most people had us around the 8-10 range this year, we're looking more like 12-15 range.

    Melbourne Storm are a much bigger story in terms of expectations vs delivery.

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