Of the eight teams that made the top 8 there are 5 teams with what I consider large packs and 3 with small packs. The teams with large packs are Storm, Bulldogs, Raiders, Cowboys and Panthers while Sharks, Broncos and Titans have the smaller packs.
Of those with smaller packs the common ingredient to their success is their ability to constantly offload. This is something that Parra is not renowned for!
We will not win a premiership with Wicks, Terepo, Alvaro and Mannah as your front line props as they rarely offload and use their bodies as battering rams, and they are too light to constantly bend the defensive line. Having all these players together in your team severely limits the attacking skills available in the backline.
BA has obviously seen the light and bought in 2 players with good offloading skills, Vave and Brown. Those that dismiss these players from their team for next year are deluding themselves in how good our pack really is with the 4 abovementioned players together.
To me the team is almost complete. Imo we are short another good big prop with offloading skills, a creative hooker (is Cameron King that hooker?) and perhaps a halfback (will the Guth or the Fog be our answer here?) is all that is needed to make the top 8. Not only to make the 8 but to be competitive against those teams.
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will time will tell because there is only 3 things stop us winning the grand final in 2 or 3 years 1 the NRL 2 the Ref 3 we keep get our good player hurt at the wrong time
Our supposedly small, non-offloading pack, was still good enough to win its fair share of games even after Junior left. In fact we put both Cronulla and the Raiders on the backfoot. We may have lost those games but they weren't easy games for those top four sides to win.
Glen you make some fair points, thing is that we lost some key players during the year, don't need to run through their names, but certainly Paulo and his ball skills were missed. If you have a look at the statt attack post on TCT you will see that we had some players with pretty good offloads through the season, but the loss of the players put a big dent in the overall team.
Mannah is a player that also has a pretty fair offload in him, as does Alvaro who is still developing, his overall stats though have been pretty good for a young prop. Taking the season overall I would say that there was very much an emphasis on defence, which is something that could be better at times owing to the points against for the year, although in saying that with the full table/combined attack and defence the eels came in with the 4th best defence but was 12 as far as attack/[points scored) our ladder position would have been 8th. A key player that we missed in the final run home was Norman, had he been there the attack would have been better.
Thing is that next year, while the defence will still be on the mark, the attack is what is needed to be lifted. Overall the forwards did a pretty fair job overall. Mannah had a crook year owing to his shoulder injury but he showed how well he can get the ball away in the game against the warriors in the final game of the season.
I would certainly not be writing any of them off, Alvaro is a future main prop, Mannah still has good football left in him. The coach needs to push the attack button for the team but in saying that for any attack to succeed the defence also has to be there as well.
Can i please have a definition of small forward?
With the additions of Vave and Brown there is nothing wrong with our pack. We play more on the edges with our forwards anyway i.e. Mau,Edwards and later in the season Yep. Our real weakness is at 9 and 7, but we already have showed we are a top 8 team.
If as I understand it, the interchange next year comes down from 8 to 6, which is really going to impact on the bigger forwards above the 110Kg mark. Players like Paulo and Kasiano are going to need to shed big kg's to be able to play for longer periods. Canberra has Paulo and Boyd at Canberra are unlikely to see the same game time as before and having two that big without being able to play the same game time will impact they have had.
Big props like them and even the two signings we have made in Brown and Vave will need to shed some weight or at least streamline their bodies if they are going to have the impact needed from them.
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