It's long been my role on here to offer a bit of optimism in the face of doom and dreary, and given I've written a couple of negative blogs, my karma is feeling all out of kilter.
Despite a few pretty painful losses, I'm still feeling pretty positive about the year ahead because I think a few of our returning players are going to make significant differences to our side. I think the impact that Junior Paulo has on our side is massively underrated. He's the one guy on our team who ensures you get go-forward.
Semi is of course going to make a massive difference to our attack and with Fa'aoso back we're going to be going into rep-season almost at full-complement.
The other player who is going to make a massive difference is Pauli Pauli. Now, I've noticed a few people saying he didn't do enough in the last game, but the simple fact is wherever he goes on the field, he is going to draw in multiple players. Right now we're struggling to create space because really Manu Ma'u is the only forward in our side who threatens the line.
I think Arthur has eased Pauli Pauli back into the action and I expect him to be used going forward as the kind of weapon we had when Pauli was making such an impact midway through last season. He will create the kind of space our attack needs to function properly.
It's actually remarkable that despite missing such firepower that we've been one of the Leagues' top scorers. And while I've seen a lot of criticism of our defence, I believe it's mostly been pretty good. While we've had a few blowouts towards the death in matches, we've done well enough to stay in every match and our forwards are now matching up on a weekly basis.
And as much as I've been critical of our halves, they are creating points. Right now, we're not a team that is good at coming up with bikkies when the game is tight and on the line, but I think coming up with a string of big home games, plus some handy games against understrength teams suffering from Origin outages will mean we can blow away a few teams and put ourselves back into contention over the next couple of months. (All of which assumes we get a decent run with injuries and suspensions).
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It is always good to be optimistic and thank christ we are getting junior and semi back but i definitely think BA needs to take some of our boys back to basics and teach them how to tackle hope we do better next round
Exactly unfortunately you can't win games from offense alone it is no good to score 5 tries a game and let in 7
And the other thing I'll note is we haven't been losing to dud teams.
We're all upset at the Brisbane loss, but fact is we played a full-strength Brisbane side, who are currently top of the table, at their home ground and we were right in the match with three minutes to go. Indeed at that stage the only difference were penalty goals.
We beat Newcastle at home which few of us would have budgeted for.
We would have expected to have beaten the Titans, but those guys have subsequently shown they're actually a pretty good side. And while I would have liked to have beaten the Tigers, we were under-strength and they are far from a poor side.
On the flipside we beat Souths before they losty Reynolds, lost to the Dogs who most of the pundits are rating top of the comp and the Warriors at home.
By my calculations, if you were budgeting your wins at the start of the year you probably would have not expected to beat Souths or Newcastle, but you may have expected wins against Titans and Wests. So we're actually pretty par for the course with what might reasonably be expected, given the number of injuries and disruptions we've suffered.
To be fair to Pauli he didn't do a great deal against the Broncos because he picked up a left shoulder injury in defence. He showed his value in our first try though, the Broncos had to throw two defenders at him on the decoy line which opened up the play out wide.
Although I understand why people are frustrated and disappointed with our inconsistency, much like you I think there are a good amount of positive to take from the first 8 rounds. We have the forwards at the club to genuinely hold our own, if not win the ruck outright. Depending on which analytics firm you use (nrlstats is the most accessible) we ran for ~200m more than the Broncos. Wicks, Ma'u, Paulo (yes he did shit stuff elsewhere) and Fa'aoso all broke 100m while Peni Terepo played his best game arguably ever for the Eels churning out 140m from the bench.
Our backups are doing damn fine jobs. Ryan Morgan, Peni Terepo and Bureta Faraimo have all exceeded my expectations and indeed the form they showed for Wenty early in the season to be solid contributors for our first grade team. John Folau is clearly a project player and that gets shown every other week but he has also come in and done some fantastic work for us.
We are doing the vast majority of the hard work to get ourselves into a position to win a match in most weeks but small lapses in judgement on both sides of the ball have really hurt us. It is no shock then that Brad Arthur continues to recruit proven competitors that will hopefully wring out those 1%-ers that are killing us.
The inconsistency of Chris Sandow is particularly damaging for mine. You really can not budget for your halfback fading in and out of games like he does. It adds to the workload of Corey Norman, who despite beginning to find moments of class weekly, still struggles to pull the team together in the red zone. On the platform our forwards are laying for him, Chrissy SHOULD be running riot but instead we get an amazing 40/20 and some minor involvement in the lead up to a try or two.
Lastly, I think it is worth mentioning that the penalty count in Brisbane was 8-2. The Broncocs were pinged for a high shot and for an offside chaser (which seemed to be an issue the refs were drilled on this week, given how vocal they were about it). Beyond those two penalties the refs deemed that the Broncos had perfect discipline all game. They never held down in the ruck or infringed inside the 10m mark. The penalties directly resulted in 6 points and plenty of territorial gains and certainly were not a direct cause for our loss but that pressure certainly adds up.
I think this blog is on the money-we're not far off. Brisbane took two or 3 penalties and the Milford and McGuire tries resulted from mental lapses again. If they start playing for 80-like st george, get back Paulo and semi back and use Pauli wisely they'll win more than they lose for the remainder of the year.
As a side note I know it's been said before but Pauli is an absolute beast. His legs are like tree trunks and he is definitely going to draw in defenders running close to the line. Good luck trying to stop him one on one
Thanks for this Phil I agree with your sentiments in the main.
Lest be honest it is a ridiculously even comp now and there are no easy games. Look at the squads the Roosters and Souths have and even they have been struggling to register wins.
There are a lot of people after a loss who come on this site and bag the team, usually starting with Chris Sandow for some reason, and say how poorly we are going when the reality is we may have played quite well but just been not good enough to win.
I think the moments of best clarity on this site actually come after a win, where people recognize that this is a pretty good team that is probably one or even two class centres and perhaps a better option at fullback short of being a genuine title threat.
There is a real trend of blaming our halves for an apparent lack of 'control' in a game where, if you look at the stats v the broncos I think you will find we actually controlled both possession and field position.
The issue is that we probably lack a bit of pace and incisiveness in the centres to capitalize on that. That's the real issue. I think its an easy out to blame the halfback when I don't think that he is going badly at all.
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