Watching last night I had mentally resigned us to losing, they were not doing enough when down by 10. The previous week I thought the same with Easts skipping out to 25-6.
We must be a reasonably good side to come back in both circumstances.....if you analyse our players we are severely disaffected by our lack of pace in the case of our three quarters. Simonsson is supposedly the fastest player in the club, would beat Waqa regularly pre season....but to me (a big supporter) he has not been once in a position to show his pace, his defence last night on two glaring occasions cost us two tries. He is proving reliable under the high ball and he slightly bends the line. Perham for all intents and purposes is a liability, pundits on here reckon he is a fullback or maybe a 5/8. He shows me nothing to suggest either. Opie, well he is a brickies labourer and we need a brickie! Penisini continues to have all the potential but if he is going to become the superstar we are craving, he needs two metres of pace in the next preseason, At his age this is not impossible.
Now we match up across the field with just about anyone else plus or minus subjective arguments.
So when you do the analysis it is not surprising we are winning ugly. Penrith, Easts, Manly are all going to beat us on occasions.
We cannot pull off the big (margins) with no pace in our 3/4's......we need to address it now.
Returning from Injury or recruit should be the discussion.
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Sivo and Blake should help when they are back even though they are not speed demons. We are down on power in kick returns at the moment but the big issue is defence. Scoring 22 points is great but constantly letting 20+ points in is not good enough. They Eels look like they never get out of second gear in defence and there is no real agro in the defence. Teams are making too many easy metres against us and are able to spread the ball due to the space we give them.
Yes Jim, while the effort is there the ability is somewhat limited in terms of execution.
In my opinion if Tom T hadn't got hurt we don't win but he did so good luck for us bad luck for them. We led for 90 seconds but they were the right 90 seconds.
Yes it was a good escape Sluggy, probably the best way to describe it,
Nice blog Poppa, you are right about the backline, Russell would have offered the same or even more than Perham, he is a bigger body.
Yes LB I think that Perham has reached a level, but I do not believe he is a player that we can go forward with and make him into something he is not.....a sort of Opie, good with the tools he has got.
You rightly point out that Russell is not going to offer a great deal either but he hasn't really had the chance yet, the two tries Perham scored are quiet similar with Russell's 3 in the first game, standard wingers finish.....one of many wingers around for example would possibly slid in where Perham chose to prop when he was nearly beheaded, I cannot imagine Russell sliding in either after his ribs experience, can't blame him but other wingers do it weekly. Waqa for example showed briefly he is not good at those classical finishes either.
Agree Poppa, thought we were on the way to another loss. And I also agree with Slugg, if Turbo stays on the field we probably lose.
Defence is Terrible. Lacks discipline with structure, no agro to hit hard or push back. Opposition's are simply too confident they can score against us.
And pace in the backine is a massive problem. It means our attack is somewhat predictable as we are never trying to put a speedster into space. It's runarounds, block plays and kicks to corners.yeah other teams do the same thing, but to go to that next level you need that extra creativity. All we have is Moses kicking little chips or grubbers.
To say something positive, Moses has matured so much in the last 12 months. He's not panicking, he's not going off at team mates, he's directing the team around, he's calm in his play. Defence has also improved. His best years are ahead of him.
I think our defence overall is fine, it is our edges more so, Simonsson twice made poor judgement errors to come off his line causing an overlap to a try, including his luckluster movement on the Garrick try where a kick was put in. We made Harper look decent LOL.
I don't get why our wingers come in so far. It has to be coached. Every game we cope a few tries due to our wingers being over ten metres in field.
Wingers shouldn't jam all the time when you have the slowest fullback in the comp
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