Eels Blogs

“He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable.” In Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Robert Louis Stevenson depicts a man of two personalities. Dr. Henry Jekyll is an accomplished scientist and upstanding citizen, and Mr. Edward Hyde is a deformed psychopath. In Rounds 1-10, the Jekyll-Eels amassed an impressive 9-1 W-L record, with a for/against of 294-140 (+154). In the following 14 games, beginning with thumping losses to Manly and Souths, the Hyde-Eels returned a disappointing 6-8 W-L record and for/against of 312-315 (-3). The back end of the Hyde-Eels’ season included a disastrous four-game losing streak (32-136 for/against). Jekyll and Hyde were two sides of the one personality, and the Eels have two sides to their personality. Jekyll brough on Hyde by drinking a potion to release a being of no conscience. Similarly, the Eels appear to swallow a potion called ‘chase the collision’ and bring on a being of ‘all body, no brain’, where they run one-out too often, lack creativity, and defend without cohesion or heart. In this finals campaign, will the Eels be Jekyll, or will they be Hyde? Will we see the creative and determined Jekyll on display against the Storm in Round 24, or the sad and decrepit Hyde that emerges when the Eels stop playing footy and just bash into things? Welcome to the Finals.

NOTE: woohoo, HOE is back for some graphics.

Teams

Sunday 11 August, Browne Park, Rockhampton, 4:05pm (AEDT). Referee: Ashley Klein.

Eels: 1. Clinton Gutherson 2. Haze Dunster 3. Viliami Penisini 4. Waqa Blake 5. Blake Ferguson 6. Dylan Brown 7. Mitchell Moses 8. Reagan Campbell-Gillard 9. Ray Stone 10. Junior Paulo 11. Shaun Lane 12. Marata Niukore 13. Nathan Brown 14. Will Smith 15. Bryce Cartwright 16. Isaiah Papali'i 17. Makahesi Makatoa 18. Ryan Matterson 19. Oregon Kaufusi 20. Tom Opacic 21. Jakob Arthur.

Head coach: Brad front loader Arthur

Knights: 1. Kalyn Ponga 2. Enari Tuala 3. Kurt Mann 4. Bradman Best 5. Hymel Hunt 6. Jake Clifford 7. Mitchell Pearce 8. Jacob Saifiti 9. Jayden Brailey 10. Daniel Saifiti 11. Tyson Frizell 12. Mitchell Barnett 13. Connor Watson 14. Sauaso Sue 15. David Klemmer 16. Josh King 17. Brodie Jones 18. Phoenix Crossland 19. Jirah Momoisea 20. Simi Sasagi 21. Jack Johns.

Head coach: Adam Ooooooo’Brien.

Notes: The Eels welcome back rested, suspended, and injured stars, generating some interesting selection decisions (Lane in the run-on squad, Kaufusi and Matterson not in the 17). The Knights also welcome back rested and injured stars, primarily in the forward back with the Saifiti brothers and Klemmer returning.

Observations from Last Week

Two reserve grade sides took the field in Round 25, with the Eels’ reserves losing 6-40 to Penrith and the Knights reserves losing 22-35 to the Broncos.

Eels/Penrith highlights HERE.  Hint?: the Eels had the right intentions but had trouble following through.

Knights/Broncos highlights HERE.  Hint: the Knights played with a distinct lack of cohesion or polish.

Hint: not actually the highlights videos.

Eels, don’t stop believin’

Well, as Journey said, ‘just one more time, some will win, some will lose’. None of us want to stop believin’, but The Eels’ finals record under Arthur makes for dismal reading.

Indeed, Brad Arthur has a lot of ground to make up even when just compared to former Eels coaches, with Jack Gibson winning 80% of finals games versus BA just 16.7%. Note that even if we pull out the rainbow stick, with BA taking the Eels to a grand final win this year, BA will still only jump to a 5-5 and 50% record. The perennial commentators curse that the Eels must be judged on finals games because that is where they have fallen flat in recent seasons, is born out in this instance.

History can be a cruel master, and the sad-face emoji rears its stupid little yellow face when we realize the Eels’ recent poor form in finals games is replicated further back in time against the Knights. There was of course the 2001 GF when a visibly uptight Eels lost to a free-wheeling Knights, whose chief antagonist now sits on the Eels coaching staff (Andrew Johns).

But that was 20 years ago, and now we see two teams that could be described as on the rise. The Eels are into their third successive finals campaigns, and the Knights their second.

BA actually holds a slim but probably inconsequential lead over O’Brien when it comes to finals wins.

But more promising is that the Eels have taken the spoils against the Knights more recently, including a 40-4 demolition of the Knights in Round 13. Notably, Ponga and Pearce were absent that day, along with David Saifiti and Klemmer. Still, the game was billed as an emotional one for the Knights – some crap about Old Boys Day – but the Eels spoiled the party. This week will be emotional but both teams are also at full-strength.

Aaaaaand, the game is at Browne Park. Where?

Overall, the history of these teams is a mixed bag for the Eels. But as Percey Shelley said – the hubby of the more famous Mary Shelley, of Frankenstein fame – ‘fear not for the future, weep not for the past’. The Eels have a chance to build on the fine victory over the Storm in Round 24 and build some confidence going forward via a win over the Knights.

To get a sense of the difference between the Eels and whoever they are playing in any given week, we use nrl.com/stats to compare the statistics for attack and defence/discipline.

Attack: The smaller the number, the better the ranking (you succeed at doing these things better than others … 1^st is good, 16^th is bad). Also: green, yellow, light red, dark red is better to worse.

Defence & Discipline: The smaller the number, the worse the ranking (you are more guilty of these problems than others … 16^th is good, 1^st is bad). Also: green, yellow, light red, dark red is better to worse.What do you see when you look over those stats above? One problem for the Knights is that their attack is ranked 15^th in the competition (Eels ranked 7^th in attack). Only the Bulldogs scored less points than the Knights. On the other side of the ball, the Knights’ defence is ranked 8^th and the Eels’ defence is ranked 4^th. A significant factor in this game might just be which Eels defensive team turns up? If Jekyll-Eels runs out, the Knights might lack the firepower to score enough points against the Eels’ defence. But if Hyde-Eels runs out, the Eels defense can go completely missing, and Pearce and Ponga could have some fun.

What do you see when you look over those stats above? If anyone watched the Knights game against the Broncos, the Knights’ left-side of Clifford, Best and Tuala seemed all at sea defensively. On their right side, Pearce has tended to sprint out of the line to shut down the play but can come up with thin air, Waqa-Blake-style. For the Eels, hands up if you are by now confused and must double check who plays on which side? OK, so, Moses is now right-side half and DBrown left-side half. Outside Moses on the right is Penisini and Fergo, and outside DBrown on the left is Waqa and Dunster. It is now impossible to really know what the LMR Stats show about the Eels, given the positional changes, and the disruptions to edge backrowers (Matto, Lane, Papali’I and Niukore all moving in and out of those roles due injury, suspension, and form). Suffice it to say that IF both Moses and Dylan run the ball deep into the line, like both did against the Storm, the Knights will struggle, because the Knights’ edge defence makes rash plays. Similarly, if the Eels can run hard and get short passes between their forwards and centres, the Eels have the artillery to suck the Knights into the center of the field and expose the Knights edge defence.

One thing we can speculate on is that if the Knights cross the halfway line with tackles to spare, or when the Knights are in the attacking zone, the Knights have about two shapes they run at teams. In each shape, Pearce comes to the centre of the field as the play goes out to Ponga, whether that be to the right or the left. The two shapes are then an effective and an ineffective one. In the former, Ponga gets the ball square or parallel to the defensive line, and Ponga can then draw and pass or dummy and run and alarm bells should be ringing for the Eels when the Knights run that shape. In the latter, Ponga gets the ball in an “I” pattern, or perpendicular to the defensive line, on a small angle outside his half, and that is ineffective because Ponga only has one way to go. Thanks, Matty Johns, for talking about this ad nauseum on your podcast and hopefully your bother said ‘doofus’ and Brad Arthur and troops watched the segment.

The Bottom Line

In Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll’s best buddy is the lawyer, Gabriel Utterson. Utterson gives Jekyll a walking stick as a gift and as a sign of friendship. In Victorian England, a cane was a sign of being a gentleman. But Mr. Hyde, Jekyll’s other side, uses that gift of friendship as a murder weapon (killing Sir Danvers Carew). I want to speculate that Brad Arthur gave the Eels the gift of ‘the power game’. The power game is about effort areas, including running hard but also using a compressed defence to be in the face of your opponent, and about chasing the collision (crash plays and offloads). The power game is a gift that permits the Eels to beat 10-12 other teams almost any week of the season.

But the power game can go wrong, and not necessarily through abuse, like Mr. Hyde abusing the gentlemanly cane. The power game can be a sign of stunted development. In the book, while Dr. Jekyll greets his friends at the front door of the house, Mr. Hyde always enters through the back, using a door hardly anyone knows even accesses the house. Mr. Hyde also only uses two rooms of an otherwise giant house. This was Stevenson’s way of symbolically showing that Mr. Hyde had limited development.

The power game is limited development. Like Mr. Hyde and the cane, the Eels are often too tempted to take the gift of the power game and convert it into one-dimensional style of play, absolutely murdering any creativity. In these moments, the Eels play with the metaphorical two rooms of the mansion, bashing and barging. Not coincidentally, the Eels again have a losing (6-7 W-L) record against the Top 8 teams. However, the Eels showed us they could play more creative football against the Storm in Round 24. The Eels scored four tries from running the ball and creating overlaps. It was not just kick and hope.

So, where to now for the Eels? Dr. Jekyll found himself turning randomly into Mr. Hyde. To control this descent into evil, Dr. Jekyll had to progressively increase the dose of the potion to prevent the change. Maybe BA tried the same strategy, harping on about front loading the effort and chasing the collision. But eventually Dr. Jekyll ran out of the right ingredients for the potion. The same as BA’s Hyde-Eels ran out of steam at mid-season (again). Chapter 10 of the book is Dr. Jekyll’s confession letter to Utterson that he was in fact also Mr. Hyde, who at the end of Chapter 9 has been found dead in the house (Mr. Hyde feared being hanged for his crimes and thus took his own life). The Hyde-Eels similarly self-imploded in the back end of the season.

The final line of the novel reports Dr. Jekyll’s knowledge that in letting Mr. Hyde out he was ultimately harming himself. In Dr Jekyll’s pen: “God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself. Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end”. Or as we should be saying in Eels’ territory, it is time for the Eels to cut their Mr. Hyde loose – an over-emphasis on one-out crash plays at either end of the field – before the evil within takes down the better half of the team. Run hard, tackle hard, but move that ball around. Don’t be Mr. Hyde, all blood, and no creative spirit. As I lay down the pen (keyboard), hopefully the Eels can emerge from their split-personality and play with all rooms of the mansion. Go Eels.