The Wests Tigers can probably say they have officially shaken off their Parramatta bogey as they reversed the Eel’s good fortune at Leichardt to down the Blue and Gold 31 to 18.
From the initial rucks, it was evident that the Tigers were every chance of dominating this game. They were highly energetic in defence, and forced early errors which Parramatta compounded when Matt Keating delivered an awful ball from dummy half to Mitch Allgood who spilled the ball to put the Eels under tremendous early pressure. The Tigers were quick to capitalise, targeting Chris Sandow who was no match for a charging Chris Lawrence and the Tigers took an early four to nil lead. Benji Marshall was off-target with his kick, but was able to stretch the lead to six through a penalty soon after.
The Tigers second try came in near identical circumstances with Lawrence again getting the better of Sandow and this time Marshall made no mistake with the kick to make it twelve to nil and even after 20 minutes, a blowout was threatening.
Wests Tigers continued to have the better of the Eels on the fringes and at 31 minutes Blake Ayshford caught the Eels markers napping and barged over, to put Wests 18 to blot up, a score they carried through to half-time.
It wasn’t that the Eels didn’t have chances. Both Allgood and Jacob Loko dropped the ball over the line and those two opportunities could have put the Eels right on the Tiger’s hammer. It’s probably fair to say almost every bounce of the ball went Wests way and the Eels had very little possession,
The early minutes of the second half gave Parramatta some hope when a penalty put them on the attack and Ryan Morgan did some great work to score and put the Eels back to within two converted tries at 18 to 6.
It was almost back-to-back tries, when Chris Sandow floated across field, beat Lawrence but when reaching the fullback kicked to the outside when he had men free inside him and Marika Koroibete easily outpaced Cheyse Blair to stop the try.
Then the Eels imploded. After they gave away an ill-disciplined penalty and then were marched for backchat, Jarryd Hayne was too busy contesting the decision and no Eels defender marked up to stop Benji Marshall, who took a quick tap and raced 60m to score untouched.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the Eels were marched again after Darcy Lussick gave the referee a spray. At the end of the proceeding set, Vai Toutai inexplicably tried to bat a kick back to Jarryd Hayne, who couldn’t gather and instead Tim Moltzen touched down to push the Tigers lead out to 30 to 6.
Except for that error, Toutai had a pretty strong game. He made a great dummy half run that got the Eels off to a good march downfield and then Parramatta’s backline clicked into action with Jacob Loko showing good hands to put Toutai into space and the young winger did superbly to get the ball down with Liam Fulton coming across in defence.
Parramatta then revived memories of last year’s comeback, when Joseph Paulo put Mitchell Allgood into half a gap and the big prop broke through found Matt Keating in support, who dished off to Jarryd Hayne. Hayne floated a great ball out to Loko who put Parra back within 12, following Sandow’s conversion.
Just as Parramatta’s hopes were rising though, the Tigers took advantage of another penalty to set up for a field goal which Jacob Miller calmly slotted home.
There is some promise in this side, but the reality is they are young and they’re inexperience showed through on numerous occasions, with ill-discipline, lack of concentration and just plain old poor decision putting them to the sword tonight against a side with more class and experience.
Replies
Jarryd Hayne is not mature enough to be captain.........
Ben Smith needs to just retire and is useless
Ben Roberts is an absolute joke....how the hell he continues to get selected is beyond me
Matt Keating has no skill except he is a useful speedbump sometimes
Cheyse Blair is some wannabe bad ass prettyboy
What's the opposite of a unicorn, because whatever they are, a lot have come out to play here tonight!
It scares me the way the team plays at times and my mind tries telling me Stephen Kearney is still our coach.
ShaMe Hayne (the supposed ref) made sure we did not get a chance in the first half.
Sloppy passages in the second half.
We never once really threatened to get into this game, and the Tigers did give us a few opportunities to do so.
Young guys better learn to suck it up when the ref is against us and just get on with the game.
Unicorn milk has been left out in the sun too long.
70% possession to the Tiges in the first half tells me something is terribly wrong BUT it was not all the Eels doing.
Ok, i need to vent as i am becoming "PHYSICALLY SICK" from watching my beloved Eels play. This will take a minute or two so bare with me;
1. So far this year it seems like 95% of all points scored against us have been from the Eels giving away penalties or dropping the ball. I honestly think we would have won all our games so far if we had of held onto the ball and not given away cheap shitty penalties.
2. How can our attack from the other week have suddenly gone missing these last two weeks? Every time i see an Eels player with the ball there isn't another player in sight. There is absolutely no one running holes off the player with the ball, they are all standing around waiting for the player with the ball to do something with it before they will even try to chip in. Ricky Stuart needs to show the players the highlights from the last half of 09 and they will see that every time a player ran with the ball he had at least two options to offload too. How can we get any second phase play going when there is no one to pass too?
3. This kills me to say this. Jaryd Hayne is hardly even in the games at the moment. The last few seasons it was all on him and i agree it was too much but now it seems like he is just there to back up players who make a break, which he has done very well, but we don't have anyone making any breaks. He needs to inject himself into the game a lot more to set up more plays than finish them off. Sorry Jaryd, you have the physical and natural abilities to be great but you are nowhere near consistent enough to get there. Take that with a grain of salt as i am nothing more than an arm chair critic but one of your biggest fans.
4. These players need to go;
Ben Roberts. Rocks and Diamonds as everyone says but nowhere near enough diamonds to make up for all the rocks. i really do think if he could get rid of the mistakes from his game and bad reads he could be an amazing player. This doesn't look like happening though.
Matt Keating. Great defensive rake but awful in attack. Predictable, slow, regularly takes the wrong option in the direction of play. Parra really need a good rake to get us going forward.
Ben Smith. I have been a big fan of his until the last two seasons. Slow, predictable, no venom in his runs and give away penalties at the worst possible times.
Imagine how Ricky Stuart must be feeling right now with the realization of just what a mess he has inherited. He has a massive job ahead of him and like other coaches who have come before him he will most likely get the boot before he can make the changes that are really needed.
On a positive note, and there aren't many. The young guys who have come through, Sandow, Tanginoa, Vai and Loko have been awesome. I am actually very happy with the forwards other than smith. I really thought they would struggle but have been our only real glimmer of hope.
I love the Eels but they need to make some drastic changes to get out of this near decade long rubbish they have been producing. It will be a long time before we break that premiership drought with what we are producing.
Sorry Eels, i hate to bag on my team but enough is enough.
I agree with you on most points, i think our major problem was missing Luke key though. Having two off the cuff halves doesnt work you need one who is just going to do his job and complete sets if the try isnt on.
I think Matt keating can still fit into our team but maybe for the last twenty of each half, he has ability but i think you touched on the points where he fails.
I think the thing that hurts is we are all now feeling that losing feeling again after two straight losses, its early in the season so we need to keep our head up and lower our expectations. we are coming off a wooden spoon. GO PARRA!
Pretty well summed up & a fair appraisal.
I think that with a young backline we will be vulnerable to errors until the young players gain more NRL match experience. Even though there is a big difference from playing for Wenty then stepping up into the NRL, I was happy with their efforts however it will be quite a while before they can consistently play 80 mins of quality footy.
The only other comments I would add r that Hayne is not a Captain & if RS leaves him with that responsibility, we r in for a long frustrating season. I am having great difficulty in accepting his superstar status at Parra. He is starting to remind me of a more talented version of Ben Roberts capable of brilliance one minute & silly errors or periods of complacency the next. A real enigma & I really don't know how u build a team around that.
I was wrong about Darcy Lussick. He is better than what I originally thought & he gives us some real impact in the middle. I agree with your comments concerning Ben Roberts. As he is in the last year of his contract & we r in a rebuilding phase, I think we should cut our losses & permanently relegate him to Wenty. When Luke Kelly is injured we should take the opportunity of blooding someone with potential that we intend to keep long term.
Sorry but where last week we threw the game away this week we were without doubt robbed. The decisions throughout the game were a joke. Hayne has the ball stripped & its play on & Tigers score. Then Tigers drop the ball cold & get a penalty (if I was Lusick I would have decked the dumb prick - nothing worse than refs making bad calls then have the hide to call out players & have a go at them). Tigers winger gets a penalty for throwing a punch??? Eels disallowed a fair try after Farah strip on Loko. The list goes on & on.
Was proud of the Eels tonight...much better performance but you can't beat cheats!
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