O.K., lets firstly address the elephant in the room. Right now, Daniel Mortimer is showing every sign of suffering from second year syndrome.
At a time when the Eels are wanting their young half to step up and take on more responsibility, Mortimer's performances so far have been dissapointing. His game on the weekend was well below par. It included just about every footballing sin you could care to mention from dropped balls, kicking the ball out of the full, hospital passes and poor defence. In particular, his general kicking game was simply sub-standard. I'm struggling to recall one effective kick.
Let me be clear, I'm not about to write Mortimer off. When he came into grade, I admit I had my doubts as to whether he was up to NRL level at that stage of his career, however he exceeded every expectation I had of him. Mortimer is tenacious, extremely fit, is a terrific support player and naturally gifted.
However, the reality is that the second season for any half, particularly if you're Mortimer's size. Teams are running more traffic at him. Last week, the Dragons got Mortimer's tackle count up to 27. Manly weren't quite as deliberate in general play, but as soon as they got into the strike zone all of the traffic went Mortimer's way and the result was three early tries. We're going to see that week in, week out.
Manly also sorted out Mortimer when defending. Matai mostered poor Dan all game, consistently getting up in his face to hit him as soon as he received the ball. The fact that Mortimer is unlikely to have the strength to shrug off a tackle like this, makes it a particularly effective defensive strategy and the Eels outside backs subsequently saw very little ball.
Second-year syndrome cruels so many players, because once your weaknesses have been highlighted, they're constantly exploited. It's going to be a real test of Daniel's character and his ability to pick his game up again, because an inability to apply pressure with their kicking game has really hurt Parramatta thus far this season.
Both of our halves, Robson and Mortimer, were made to look good last year by Jarryd Hayne. However, the Eels showed again with their first half performance that when Hayne is off, so is the team. Hayne had his share of first-half clangers, also kicking the ball out on the full, throwing a wild cut-out pass that only found the touch judge and a couple of other ordinary plays. With both Hayne and Mortimer mis-firing, it's probably not any wonder that we went into the first half with a hefty deficit.
Timana Tahu can also shoulder a lot of the blame for those early tries. He made some terrible reads. He rushed in, when he should have stayed out and he stayed out when he should have came in. Fixing this left-hand defence, I'm sure will be Daniel Anderson's number one priority during the week or Benji Marshall next week will cut it to ribbons. I think Ando needs to give consideration to having Ben Smith defend on that side of the field. He has easily been Parramatta's best defensive player so far this year and in partnership with Joel Reddy, Manly never looked like beating our right-side, despite that being where Anthony Watmough was lurking all game.
Discipline was again an issue, although not as bad as last week but early penalties again put us under unnecessary pressure.
Last week, I caned our forwards but this week I thought they were generally very good. Indeed, I thought they were the better of the two packs. Line speed was better than fair, especially after the interchange with both Moimoi and Mannah doing well on that front. The fact that Brent Kite was kept down to just 86 metres for 13 hitups was indivative of that effort.
Poore and Cayless both made excellent metres. Both averaged close to nine metres per hit-up and they consistently troubled the Manly defence. And of course Moimoi was superb. He changed the course of the match and as the Eels revved up their effort, Moimoi was at the centre of it. Mateo also made good metres when he ran onto the ball. And one would be remiss not to mention Eric Grothe, who did a huge amount of work carting the ball out in the heat, and really shined in the second half. We had no problems, working up the field in this game nor did Manly make significant inroads down the middle.
Both dummy halves did fine and the interchange worked much better this week. Matt Keating picked up 41 metres from 4 runs and Kris Keating was busy with 58 metres from 6 runs. This compares to the Manly dummy halves who made just 30 metres between them.
Anderson's interchange worked much better this week. Kris was able to come on and play hooker and then towards the end of the match, he dropped into half back. I'm sure Anderson wants Keating to be more involved, he just hasn't quite worked out the best way to do it. This week's plan worked pretty well though. KK lifted the tempo at dummy half, as he always will and then when we were chasing points he provided Anderson with the option of getting more directly involved as halfback. I would suggest Anderson will stick to that plan for the time-being, unless Mortimer and Robson fail to lift their kicking games because it's probably the key area right now that the side has to address.
That, and the left-hand side defence. Those two issues, and how to instill some confidence in Daniel Mortimer will be Anderson's challenge for the week. The fact that our fortunes remain so dependent on one player - however brilliant the mercurial Jarryd Hayne is, also remains cause for concern. But our forwards stepped up and, as they did towards the end of last year, demonstrated size isn't everything. And a couple of blokes, notably Joel Reddy and Ben Smith produced pretty special defensive performances that meant we didn't concede even more points, when weight of posession indicated we probably should have.
And yes, we were lucky to win. For all the talk of forward passes and obstruction, what cost Manly in the end was a kicking game that was just as bad as our own. When they had the chance to pin us, they failed to do it. Their only kick that stood-up in the in-goal came with a kick chase that was so ragged we scored from it. As was shown the previous week, a top side like the Dragons don't do that. We definitely need to improve, but there is ample scope to do so.
Replies
At the moment we are trying to get around that by using Hayne, but I think Hayne is going to be subject to some kind of burn out it we expect him to be chief ball player, chief kicker in general play, chief bomb taker, chief kick returner chief everything.
Some pressure needs to be taken off Hayne.
Our Kicking game is poor. And yeah Mortimer needs to hit the weights hard, bulk up abit more.
To me is like opposite coaches have studied Parramatta hard, how to nail them, our weaknesses... They are bringing us down to earth a bit.
The fact that his kicking game is so off, is one of the tells for me about a lack of confidence. There was the one kick in the second half, where I think he was attempting a chip and chase but he kicked it way too deep and basically ended up lobbing it up to the fullback. It was if he knew what he wanted to, but didn't quite have the confidence to go through with it so it ended up being this half-hearted nothing.
Anyways, its early days in the season and we can still put it down to opening-round rust. We've got a great coaching staff and I'm sure they'll be working with Daniel on all of these issues. But as I said in the pre-season, one should never underestimate how real second-year syndrome is for halves in the NRL.
I think the main issue with Hayne is, who would want to back us without Hayne in the team? The reality is he's going to have rep duty this year and even assuming he goes through the year injury free we are going to have to play without him, and right now there's nobody who even looks like stepping up.
It is absolutely no surprise that opposing coaches have studied Parra hard over the off-season. Considering our great run came at the back end of last season, opposing coaches were more concerned with their own sides scramble towards the play-offs to spend too much time analysing us and as a result, we pulled a few teams' pants down. This won't happen this year and we'll need to rely more heavily on the basics like:
1. Good defensive line speed
2. Quick play the balls
3. Percentage offloading
4. A kicking game that applies pressure (like Jamie Soward's)
All pretty basic stuff, but in reality, last season, these 4 factors rarely worked in concert. Generally, it was just two or three moments of absolute brilliance from Hayne that earned us the result and as Phil says, we need to learn not to so fully rely on him.
shouldnt matter if he is our 6 or 7, i think its pretty obvious he is our attacking half and robbo is more the defensive half, and a great one at that. mortimer just needs a confident performance and he should fall back into his rythm again and start dictating abit more.
But again it seems if jarryd doesnt fire parra dnt either. our 9,6 and 7 need to lead the pack around better.
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