Just in case you needed to feel some of that good old fashioned Eels disappointment on a by week, have a read of this article:
Brilliantly written as always from the RL Eye Test, but far out does it strike at the heart. Here's a flavour of the article just to whet the appetite:
Agile middles with good lateral mobility are worth a premium, and the Eels don’t really have any of them. They have an excellent forward pack for the late 2010s, but an abysmal one for the mid 2020s.
Ah man it sucks to be an Eels fan.
Replies
Apart from maybe Hopgood, we dont have players that week to week can depend on to win games. They all go missing crucial times in games.
Discipline is appalling
fitness is not close to most other teams
defensive structure is laughable
We are a club in decline, not on the up
Great Article exposing something where you can learn from disappointments in being at the bottom of the ladder in what you do. Sometimes being in that place can be a good place to be to have a clearer view on how to progress. If you are midfield you can be stuck in that place for a long time.Being at the bottom is where an opportunity to address a new approach becomes much clearer. Use this opportunity wisely
Parra's weakness is there back 5 that's where they are the slowest least athletic team in the league.
The fact they haven't invested or have development that is key to them winning the battle in the middle of the field is the Achilles heal of this side.
For this team to win with the roster it has it needs to play a certain way.You can see it in it's patchy inconsistent nature.If a game goes a certain way Parra can win when.it doesn't they get exposed.
Your last few sentences are spot on Coryn - for our team to win we need to play a certain way. Which explains why we have always been prone to blow-outs, and why we only win against teams who play into our gameplan (eg the Panthers) and not those who play around our gameplan (eg Rabbits, Manly).
Now that we've been playing with the same squad and the same gameplan for so long, the gameplan to beat us is laughably simple. Play around us, run us around early, exhaust our squad (even if it means giving up a few points) and then tear us to shreds in the second half on our edges and by running around us.
We've all said this forever - that we have no Plan B. I think this analysis points out pretty solidly that the lack of Plan B isn't just a coaching issue, it's also a squad composition issue. We are an ageing squad assembled to suit one (now outdated) plan, and when that plan fails...we fail.
Good pick up Cappy and it demonstrates that the game has changed and effectively we haven't changed with it.
I can accept that in the 2000 period or before covid things were more beneficial for us and all the changes being mooted are now past a "think test" one of the most obvious things to me has been with Cartright not in the side we have no shape at all in our pack, Carty has been a relevation that has proven coincidental in terms of planning, I cannot believe he was perservered with by BA with a forward(no pun) understanding, you could say we are very lucky that Carty fell into place.
The other thing is that in Moretti we don't seem to have a lateral mover, I like him but is it a coaching thing? Tuilagi the forward from Manly showed when placed in the centres through circumstances that he has no lateral movement/defence at all. We are being drilled up the middle and out wide on the edges and that's not even getting to the non-sliding overlaps we create. No wonder we have more line breaks against us than any other team!
Yes I supported the R&R untill this season but realistically the writing was on the wall the year we got to the GF. Hindsight is fine but not when you ignore it and do nothing about it, then the consequences are what BA and MON are facing now,hence their exit as a matter of just time.
A lot is being said by people about no support for Brown and Hopgood when they poke their shoulders through. Is it fitness/fatigue or "no want" that prevents us from supporting the ball carrier. Again something I noticed with Carty not being there, he seems to be the link when he is playing.
BA has done a solid job making us competitive since getting the spoon. The issue for me is he is either so stubborn that he will not change things, he is incapable of adapting to the changes in the modern game, or both. I have called him a one trick pony for some time now as his game as a whole remains the same overall whereas quality coaches who do and have adapted, worked us out long ago. Years of the same defensive weaknesses for example still not fixed because the coach seems so fixated on sticking with the same ol same old and thinking that will always work. As the saying goes, "if you always do what you've always done, you"ll always get what you've always got." That right there sums up BAs coaching style , games plan and game management.
It's dementing
I've written this before, but I'll say it again. The 2024 version of the NRL relies on shifting the ball in your own end of the field. Yes, we have some ageing players, but BA's gameplan is not helping here. We're playing an outdated style that is brutal on our players and is clearly taking its toll.
We obviously have a line speed issue. So why are we continuing to ask our middles to do all of the yardage work and then tackle their backsides off? The good sides use their outside backs in yardage to rest their middles and then their middles are fresher to defend.
It's a failure on both the recruitment side of things and on the current game plan. BA's game plan worked 2 years ago because we had the players in the type of form that allowed it to work.
I wonder if BA's inability to adapt has something to do with the grand final. Like a thought process of "well it worked once, why can't it work again?" Although at this stage that's like Apple re-releasing the iPod touch when smart phones have been streaming music for a decade. It was ideal in a certain era, but that's gone and it's never coming back.
I mentioned this the last couple of seasons the making of this team is it's halves that's the strength getting to edges means there on the ball more.The bonus of this is your making the whole line move foward and back and it eventually opens space in the middle making your middles job a hole lot easier.
Its much like I thought when Moses went down Barrett would have more input into how we use the ball and how to get best use out of DB.Instead we went the easy option kept the same structure left and right halves and attacked the same way minimising disruption hoping Asi/Talagi/Sanders could do the job.For me another coaching mistake.
Its caught us out because we don't have meter eating outside backs and we don't have the. Moses kicking game to bail poor yardage sets out..For me this is where the coaching nouse is lacking.
It also doesn't help our senior players haven't really led by example to get us out of this either.
This comes back to the chicken and egg thing though - given the amount of dollars we have tied up in our middles, with next to nothing tied up in our outside backs, how can BA switch his gameplan? Is he just "playing to his strengths" even though that tactic doesn't work in todays game?
The reason I ask this isn't to defend BA, it's to try and set expectations as to what a switch of coach will actually do. A great chef can certainly make bad ingredients taste better than a crappy chef...but can they turn it into a 5 star meal?
On the inability to adapt - this has always been a criticism of BA right back from the beginning, and he's done nothing to break the perception. In fact I think he actually prides himself on his stubborness because he continually bats away comments with "Oh yeah I'm always on the chopping block, that conversation has always been happening".
I think for BA the fact that he was very initially under-rated for a period of time actually stopped him improving because it put him into a seige mentality where he feels like it's a failure of his leadership to change, evolve and adapt. I think he feels like changing will be him admitting that he's been a failure. Ignoring the fact that the best coaches reinvent their tactics, teams and selves over and over again to suit a moving game.
-
1
-
2
-
3
-
4
of 4 Next